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We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. Given a set of $n$ arms indexed from $1$ to $n$, each arm $i$ is associated with an unknown reward distribution supported on $[0,1]$ with mean…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Pinyan Lu , Chao Tao , Xiaojin Zhang

We study best-arm identification in stochastic dueling bandits under the sole assumption that a Condorcet winner exists, i.e., an arm that wins each noisy pairwise comparison with probability at least $1/2$. We introduce a new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-17 El Mehdi Saad , Victor Thuot , Nicolas Verzelen

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Wei You , Chao Qin , Zihao Wang , Shuoguang Yang

In this work I study the problem of adversarial perturbations to rewards, in a Multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. Specifically, I focus on an adversarial attack to a UCB type best-arm identification policy applied to a stochastic MAB. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Varsha Pendyala

We consider the "policy choice" problem -- otherwise known as best arm identification in the bandit literature -- proposed by Kasy and Sautmann (2021) for adaptive experimental design. Theorem 1 of Kasy and Sautmann (2021) provides three…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-11-25 Kaito Ariu , Masahiro Kato , Junpei Komiyama , Kenichiro McAlinn , Chao Qin

The problem of identifying the best arm among a collection of items having Gaussian rewards distribution is well understood when the variances are known. Despite its practical relevance for many applications, few works studied it for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-24 Marc Jourdan , Rémy Degenne , Emilie Kaufmann

We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-17 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Peter L. Bartlett , Victor Gabillon , Alan Malek , Michal Valko

We consider a good arm identification problem in a stochastic bandit setting with multi-objectives, where each arm $i \in [K]$ is associated with a distribution $D_i$ defined over $R^M$. For each round $t$, the player pulls an arm $i_t$ and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Xuanke Jiang , Sherief Hashima , Kohei Hatano , Eiji Takimoto

We formulate, analyze and solve the problem of best arm identification with fairness constraints on subpopulations (BAICS). Standard best arm identification problems aim at selecting an arm that has the largest expected reward where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Yuhang Wu , Zeyu Zheng , Tingyu Zhu

Given a finite set of unknown distributions or arms that can be sampled, we consider the problem of identifying the one with the maximum mean using a $\delta$-correct algorithm (an adaptive, sequential algorithm that restricts the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Shubhada Agrawal , Sandeep Juneja , Peter Glynn

Berry et al. (1997) initiated the development of the infinite arms bandit problem. They derived a regret lower bound of all allocation strategies for Bernoulli rewards with uniform priors, and proposed strategies based on success runs.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-23 Hock Peng Chan , Shouri Hu

We introduce the safe best-arm identification framework with linear feedback, where the agent is subject to some stage-wise safety constraint that linearly depends on an unknown parameter vector. The agent must take actions in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-19 Xuedong Shang , Igor Colin , Merwan Barlier , Hamza Cherkaoui

We investigate top-$m$ arm identification, a basic problem in bandit theory, in a multi-agent learning model in which agents collaborate to learn an objective function. We are interested in designing collaborative learning algorithms that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Nikolai Karpov , Qin Zhang

The pure-exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits aims to find one or more arms with the largest (or near largest) means. Examples include finding an {\epsilon}-good arm, best-arm identification, top-k arm identification, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-14 Blake Mason , Lalit Jain , Ardhendu Tripathy , Robert Nowak

Thompson Sampling algorithm is a well known Bayesian algorithm for solving stochastic multi-armed bandit. At each time step the algorithm chooses each arm with probability proportional to it being the current best arm. We modify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Qiang Ha

In this paper we study a multi-arm bandit problem in which the quality of each arm is measured by the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) at some level alpha of the reward distribution. While existing works in this setting mainly focus on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Dorian Baudry , Romain Gautron , Emilie Kaufmann , Odalric-Ambryn Maillard

We consider a non-stationary formulation of the stochastic multi-armed bandit where the rewards are no longer assumed to be identically distributed. For the best-arm identification task, we introduce a version of Successive Elimination…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-09-09 Robin Allesiardo , Raphaël Féraud , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

We study the minimax sample complexity of $\varepsilon$-best arm identification in linear bandits. Given a compact action set $\mathcal{X}$ that spans $\mathbb{R}^d$ and an unknown reward vector $\theta\in\mathbb{R}^d$, the goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Arnab Maiti , Yunbei Xu , Kevin Jamieson

The regret lower bound of Lai and Robbins (1985), the gold standard for checking optimality of bandit algorithms, considers arm size fixed as sample size goes to infinity. We show that when arm size increases polynomially with sample size,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-06 Hock Peng Chan , Shouri Hu

We study the batched best arm identification (BBAI) problem, where the learner's goal is to identify the best arm while switching the policy as less as possible. In particular, we aim to find the best arm with probability $1-\delta$ for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Tianyuan Jin , Yu Yang , Jing Tang , Xiaokui Xiao , Pan Xu