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We consider the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits, which focuses purely on exploration. A player is given a fixed budget to explore a finite set of arms, and the rewards of each arm are drawn independently from a fixed,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-08-02 Shahin Shahrampour , Mohammad Noshad , Vahid Tarokh

We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator. Existing approaches to the related problem of inverse reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-23 Wenshuo Guo , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Aditya Grover , Vidya Muthukumar , Ashwin Pananjady

Pure exploration in multi-armed bandits has emerged as an important framework for modeling decision-making and search under uncertainty. In modern applications, however, one is often faced with a tremendously large number of options. Even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Parth K. Thaker , Mohit Malu , Nikhil Rao , Gautam Dasarathy

Satisficing is a relaxation of maximizing and allows for less risky decision making in the face of uncertainty. We propose two sets of satisficing objectives for the multi-armed bandit problem, where the objective is to achieve reward-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-20 Paul Reverdy , Vaibhav Srivastava , Naomi Ehrich Leonard

For a wireless avionics communication system, a Multi-arm bandit game is mathematically formulated, which includes channel states, strategies, and rewards. The simple case includes only two agents sharing the spectrum which is fully studied…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2017-11-15 Jingyang Lu , Lun Li , Dan Shen , Genshe Chen , Bin Jia , Erik Blasch , Khanh Pham

We introduce the Best Group Identification problem in a multi-objective multi-armed bandit setting, where an agent interacts with groups of arms with vector-valued rewards. The performance of a group is determined by an efficiency vector…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Mohammad Shahverdikondori , Mohammad Reza Badri , Negar Kiyavash

We study the problem of selecting a subset from a large action space shared by a family of bandits. In many natural situations, while the nominal set of actions is large, actions are highly correlated: many yield similar rewards across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Quan Zhou , Mark Kozdoba , Shie Mannor

We give a complete characterization of the complexity of best-arm identification in one-parameter bandit problems. We prove a new, tight lower bound on the sample complexity. We propose the `Track-and-Stop' strategy, which we prove to be…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-06-02 Aurélien Garivier , Emilie Kaufmann

Pure exploration in bandits formalises multiple real-world problems, such as tuning hyper-parameters or conducting user studies to test a set of items, where different safety, resource, and fairness constraints on the decision space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Udvas Das , Debabrota Basu

We consider the question introduced by \cite{Mason2020} of identifying all the $\varepsilon$-optimal arms in a finite stochastic multi-armed bandit with Gaussian rewards. We give two lower bounds on the sample complexity of any algorithm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-07 Aymen Al Marjani , Tomáš Kocák , Aurélien Garivier

Many efficient algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees have been proposed for the contextual multi-armed bandit problem. However, applying these algorithms in practice can be difficult because they require domain expertise to build…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-23 Adam N. Elmachtoub , Ryan McNellis , Sechan Oh , Marek Petrik

In many fields such as digital marketing, healthcare, finance, and robotics, it is common to have a well-tested and reliable baseline policy running in production (e.g., a recommender system). Nonetheless, the baseline policy is often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-11 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

This paper studies the Best-of-K Bandit game: At each time the player chooses a subset S among all N-choose-K possible options and observes reward max(X(i) : i in S) where X is a random vector drawn from a joint distribution. The objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-22 Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson , Benjamin Recht

We consider the fixed-confidence best arm identification (FC-BAI) problem in the Bayesian setting. This problem aims to find the arm of the largest mean with a fixed confidence level when the bandit model has been sampled from the known…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-25 Kyoungseok Jang , Junpei Komiyama , Kazutoshi Yamazaki

We study multi-task representation learning for the problem of pure exploration in bilinear bandits. In bilinear bandits, an action takes the form of a pair of arms from two different entity types and the reward is a bilinear function of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Qiaomin Xie , Josiah P. Hanna , Robert Nowak

We present a new algorithm based on an gradient ascent for a general Active Exploration bandit problem in the fixed confidence setting. This problem encompasses several well studied problems such that the Best Arm Identification or…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-21 Pierre Ménard

Search algorithms for the bandit problems are applicable in materials discovery. However, the objectives of the conventional bandit problem are different from those of materials discovery. The conventional bandit problem aims to maximize…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-15 Nobuaki Kikkawa , Hiroshi Ohno

This paper addresses the problem of optimal control using search trees. We start by considering multi-armed bandit problems with continuous action spaces and propose LD-HOO, a limited depth variant of the hierarchical optimistic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-30 Ricardo Quinteiro , Francisco S. Melo , Pedro A. Santos

We tackle the problem of learning equilibria in simulation-based games. In such games, the players' utility functions cannot be described analytically, as they are given through a black-box simulator that can be queried to obtain noisy…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Alberto Marchesi , Francesco Trovò , Nicola Gatti

The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Avrim Blum , Marten Garicano , Kavya Ravichandran , Dravyansh Sharma