Related papers: Open Problem: Best Arm Identification: Almost Inst…
We consider the problem of best arm identification in a variant of multi-armed bandits called linked bandits. In a single interaction with linked bandits, multiple arms are played sequentially until one of them receives a positive reward.…
We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit problem called {\em good arm identification} (GAI), where a good arm is defined as an arm with expected reward greater than or equal to a given threshold. GAI is a pure-exploration problem…
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…
We study the combinatorial pure exploration problem Best-Set in stochastic multi-armed bandits. In a Best-Set instance, we are given $n$ arms with unknown reward distributions, as well as a family $\mathcal{F}$ of feasible subsets over the…
Motivated by an open direction in existing literature, we study the 1-identification problem, a fundamental multi-armed bandit formulation on pure exploration. The goal is to determine whether there exists an arm whose mean reward is at…
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…
We study best-arm identification with fixed confidence in bandit models with graph smoothness constraint. We provide and analyze an efficient gradient ascent algorithm to compute the sample complexity of this problem as a solution of a…
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…
In this paper, we introduce a multi-armed bandit problem termed max-min grouped bandits, in which the arms are arranged in possibly-overlapping groups, and the goal is to find the group whose worst arm has the highest mean reward. This…
We consider the classic problem of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC learning a best arm where the goal is to identify with confidence $1-\delta$ an arm whose mean is an $\epsilon$-approximation to that of the highest mean arm in a multi-armed bandit…
The best arm identification problem in the multi-armed bandit setting is an excellent model of many real-world decision-making problems, yet it fails to capture the fact that in the real-world, safety constraints often must be met while…
This work investigates the problem of best arm identification for multi-agent multi-armed bandits. We consider $N$ agents grouped into $M$ clusters, where each cluster solves a stochastic bandit problem. The mapping between agents and…
We investigate the sample-memory-pass trade-offs for pure exploration in multi-pass streaming multi-armed bandits (MABs) with the *a priori* knowledge of the optimality gap $\Delta_{[2]}$. Here, and throughout, the optimality gap…
We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed budget in stochastic multi-armed bandits with Bernoulli rewards. For the problem with two arms, also known as the A/B testing problem, we prove that there is no algorithm that (i)…
Sampling from distributions to find the one with the largest mean arises in a broad range of applications, and it can be mathematically modeled as a multi-armed bandit problem in which each distribution is associated with an arm. This paper…
We consider the best arm identification problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit framework where each arm has a tiny probability of realizing large rewards while with overwhelming probability the reward is zero. A key application of…
We consider the problem of identifying any $k$ out of the best $m$ arms in an $n$-armed stochastic multi-armed bandit. Framed in the PAC setting, this particular problem generalises both the problem of `best subset selection' and that of…
This paper investigates a hitherto unaddressed aspect of best arm identification (BAI) in stochastic multi-armed bandits in the fixed-confidence setting. Two key metrics for assessing bandit algorithms are computational efficiency and…
This paper studies active learning in the context of robust statistics. Specifically, we propose a variant of the Best Arm Identification problem for \emph{contaminated bandits}, where each arm pull has probability $\varepsilon$ of…
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…