Related papers: On the Optimal Sample Complexity for Best Arm Iden…
We study a novel pure exploration problem: the $\epsilon$-Thresholding Bandit Problem (TBP) with fixed confidence in stochastic linear bandits. We prove a lower bound for the sample complexity and extend an algorithm designed for Best Arm…
Top Two algorithms arose as an adaptation of Thompson sampling to best arm identification in multi-armed bandit models (Russo, 2016), for parametric families of arms. They select the next arm to sample from by randomizing among two…
Motivated by the cost heterogeneity in experimentation across different alternatives, we study the Best Arm Identification with Resource Constraints (BAIwRC) problem. The agent aims to identify the best arm under resource constraints, where…
We study best arm identification in a restless multi-armed bandit setting with finitely many arms. The discrete-time data generated by each arm forms a homogeneous Markov chain taking values in a common, finite state space. The state…
Recent advances in bandit tools and techniques for sequential learning are steadily enabling new applications and are promising the resolution of a range of challenging related problems. We study the game tree search problem, where the goal…
Over the past few years, the multi-armed bandit model has become increasingly popular in the machine learning community, partly because of applications including online content optimization. This paper reviews two different sequential…
We give a complete characterization of the sampling complexity of best Markovian arm identification in one-parameter Markovian bandit models. We derive instance specific nonasymptotic and asymptotic lower bounds which generalize those of…
We study best arm identification (BAI) in linear bandits in the fixed-budget regime under differential privacy constraints, when the arm rewards are supported on the unit interval. Given a finite budget $T$ and a privacy parameter…
The paper proposes a novel upper confidence bound (UCB) procedure for identifying the arm with the largest mean in a multi-armed bandit game in the fixed confidence setting using a small number of total samples. The procedure cannot be…
We consider the problem of identifying the best arm in stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs) using a fixed sampling budget. Characterizing the minimal instance-specific error probability for this problem constitutes one of the important…
This paper targets a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem called good arm identification (GAI). GAI is a pure-exploration bandit problem with the goal to output as many good arms using as few samples as possible, where a…
We propose a new strategy for best-arm identification with fixed confidence of Gaussian variables with bounded means and unit variance. This strategy, called Exploration-Biased Sampling, is not only asymptotically optimal: it is to the best…
We present a provably optimal differentially private algorithm for the stochastic multi-arm bandit problem, as opposed to the private analogue of the UCB-algorithm [Mishra and Thakurta, 2015; Tossou and Dimitrakakis, 2016] which doesn't…
Best-arm identification (BAI) in a fixed-budget setting is a bandit problem where the learning agent maximizes the probability of identifying the optimal (best) arm after a fixed number of observations. Most works on this topic study…
We propose a {\em novel} piecewise stationary linear bandit (PSLB) model, where the environment randomly samples a context from an unknown probability distribution at each changepoint, and the quality of an arm is measured by its return…
In this paper, we consider a bandit problem in which there are a number of groups each consisting of infinitely many arms. Whenever a new arm is requested from a given group, its mean reward is drawn from an unknown reservoir distribution…
In fixed-confidence best arm identification (BAI), the objective is to quickly identify the optimal option while controlling the probability of error below a desired threshold. Despite the plethora of BAI algorithms, existing methods…
Learning paradigms based purely on offline data as well as those based solely on sequential online learning have been well-studied in the literature. In this paper, we consider combining offline data with online learning, an area less…
We present an efficient and generalised procedure to accurately identify the best (or near best) performing algorithm for each sub-task in a multi-problem domain. Our approach treats this as a set of best arm identification problems for…
We consider the best-k-arm identification problem for multi-armed bandits, where the objective is to select the exact set of k arms with the highest mean rewards by sequentially allocating measurement effort. We characterize the necessary…