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We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed confidence in stochastic linear bandits. The objective is to identify the best arm with a given level of certainty while minimizing the sampling budget. We devise a simple algorithm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-30 Yassir Jedra , Alexandre Proutiere

The Combined Algorithm Selection and Hyperparameter optimization (CASH) is a challenging resource allocation problem in the field of AutoML. We propose MaxUCB, a max k-armed bandit method to trade off exploring different model classes and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Amir Rezaei Balef , Claire Vernade , Katharina Eggensperger

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation in the multi-armed bandit model with bounded rewards, and develop minimax rate-optimal procedures under three settings. First, when the behavior policy is known, we show that the Switch…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-20 Cong Ma , Banghua Zhu , Jiantao Jiao , Martin J. Wainwright

Motivated by recursive learning in Markov Decision Processes, this paper studies best-arm identification in bandit problems where each arm's reward is drawn from a multinomial distribution with a known support. We compare the performance {…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Mehrasa Ahmadipour , élise Crepon , Aurélien Garivier

Bandit optimization usually refers to the class of online optimization problems with limited feedback, namely, a decision maker uses only the objective value at the current point to make a new decision and does not have access to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Yuriy Dorn , Aleksandr Katrutsa , Ilgam Latypov , Anastasiia Soboleva

Bandit based methods for tree search have recently gained popularity when applied to huge trees, e.g. in the game of go [6]. Their efficient exploration of the tree enables to re- turn rapidly a good value, and improve preci- sion if more…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-08-12 Pierre-Arnuad Coquelin , Remi Munos

We give a new algorithm for best arm identification in linearly parameterised bandits in the fixed confidence setting. The algorithm generalises the well-known LUCB algorithm of Kalyanakrishnan et al. (2012) by playing an arm which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-11 Mohammadi Zaki , Avinash Mohan , Aditya Gopalan

Much current research in AI and games is being devoted to Monte Carlo search (MCS) algorithms. While the quest for a single unified MCS algorithm that would perform well on all problems is of major interest for AI, practitioners often know…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Francis Maes , David Lupien St-Pierre , Damien Ernst

Modifying the reward-biased maximum likelihood method originally proposed in the adaptive control literature, we propose novel learning algorithms to handle the explore-exploit trade-off in linear bandits problems as well as generalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-09 Yu-Heng Hung , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Xi Liu , P. R. Kumar

We investigate the adversarial bandit problem with multiple plays under semi-bandit feedback. We introduce a highly efficient algorithm that asymptotically achieves the performance of the best switching $m$-arm strategy with minimax optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 N. Mert Vural , Hakan Gokcesu , Kaan Gokcesu , Suleyman S. Kozat

A standard assumption in contextual multi-arm bandit is that the true context is perfectly known before arm selection. Nonetheless, in many practical applications (e.g., cloud resource management), prior to arm selection, the context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Jianyi Yang , Shaolei Ren

Multi-player multi-armed bandit is an increasingly relevant decision-making problem, motivated by applications to cognitive radio systems. Most research for this problem focuses exclusively on the settings that players have \textit{full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-14 Guojun Xiong , Jian Li

Learning to play zero-sum games is a fundamental problem in game theory and machine learning. While significant progress has been made in minimizing external regret in the self-play settings or with full-information feedback, real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Shinji Ito , Haipeng Luo , Arnab Maiti , Taira Tsuchiya , Yue Wu

We analyze a tree search problem with an underlying Markov decision process, in which the goal is to identify the best action at the root that achieves the highest cumulative reward. We present a new tree policy that optimally allocates a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-29 Yunchuan Li , Michael C. Fu , Jie Xu

In this paper we consider the problem of best-arm identification in multi-armed bandits in the fixed confidence setting, where the goal is to identify, with probability $1-\delta$ for some $\delta>0$, the arm with the highest mean reward in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-13 Samarth Gupta , Gauri Joshi , Osman Yağan

We study the fixed-confidence best-arm identification problem in unimodal bandits, in which the means of the arms increase with the index of the arm up to their maximum, then decrease. We derive two lower bounds on the stopping time of any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Riccardo Poiani , Marc Jourdan , Emilie Kaufmann , Rémy Degenne

Despite being successful in board games and reinforcement learning (RL), Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) combined with Multi Armed Bandits (MABs) has seen limited success in domain-independent classical planning until recently. Previous work…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Masataro Asai , Stephen Wissow

We consider the problem of near-optimal arm identification in the fixed confidence setting of the infinitely armed bandit problem when nothing is known about the arm reservoir distribution. We (1) introduce a PAC-like framework within which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-22 Maryam Aziz , Jesse Anderton , Emilie Kaufmann , Javed Aslam

Contextual bandits can solve a huge range of real-world problems. However, current popular algorithms to solve them either rely on linear models, or unreliable uncertainty estimation in non-linear models, which are required to deal with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Adam Elwood , Marco Leonardi , Ashraf Mohamed , Alessandro Rozza

Motivated by the need to efficiently identify multiple candidates in high trial-and-error cost tasks such as drug discovery, we propose a near-optimal algorithm to identify all {\epsilon}-best arms (i.e., those at most {\epsilon} worse than…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-02 Zhekai Li , Tianyi Ma , Cheng Hua , Ruihao Zhu