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Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit with fairness constraints is a framework where multiple arms form a super arm and can be pulled in each round under uncertainty to maximize cumulative rewards while ensuring the minimum average reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Xiaoyi Wu , Bo Ji , Bin Li

We study the pure exploration problem subject to a matroid constraint (Best-Basis) in a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. In a Best-Basis instance, we are given $n$ stochastic arms with unknown reward distributions, as well as a matroid…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-26 Lijie Chen , Anupam Gupta , Jian Li

This paper considers the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits with semi-bandit feedback and a cardinality constraint on the super-arm size. Existing algorithms for solving this problem typically involve two key sub-routines: (1) a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Arpan Mukherjee , Shashanka Ubaru , Keerthiram Murugesan , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Ali Tajer

Stochastic Rising Bandits (SRBs) model sequential decision-making problems in which the expected reward of the available options increases every time they are selected. This setting captures a wide range of scenarios in which the available…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Marco Mussi , Alessandro Montenegro , Francesco Trovó , Marcello Restelli , Alberto Maria Metelli

We study fixed-confidence best arm identification in generalized linear bandits under a hybrid feedback model: at each round, the learner may query either (i) absolute reward feedback from a single arm or (ii) relative (dueling) feedback…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Qirun Zeng , Xuchuang Wang , Jiayi Shen , Xutong Liu , Fang Kong , Jinhang Zuo

Combinatorial bandits with semi-bandit feedback generalize multi-armed bandits, where the agent chooses sets of arms and observes a noisy reward for each arm contained in the chosen set. The action set satisfies a given structure such as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-22 Marc Jourdan , Mojmír Mutný , Johannes Kirschner , Andreas Krause

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Emilie Kaufmann , Aurélien Garivier

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

We study the fixed-confidence best arm identification (BAI) problem within the multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework under the Entropic Value-at-Risk (EVaR) criterion. Our analysis considers a nonparametric setting, allowing for general reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Mehrasa Ahmadipour , Aurélien Garivier

While many multi-armed bandit algorithms assume that rewards for all arms are constant across rounds, this assumption does not hold in many real-world scenarios. This paper considers the setting of recovering bandits (Pike-Burke &…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Yuto Tanimoto , Kenji Fukumizu

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

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-16 Jason Altschuler , Victor-Emmanuel Brunel , Alan Malek

We study the problem of stochastic combinatorial pure exploration (CPE), where an agent sequentially pulls a set of single arms (a.k.a. a super arm) and tries to find the best super arm. Among a variety of problem settings of the CPE, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Yuko Kuroki , Liyuan Xu , Atsushi Miyauchi , Junya Honda , Masashi Sugiyama

Motivated by recommendation problems in music streaming platforms, we propose a nonstationary stochastic bandit model in which the expected reward of an arm depends on the number of rounds that have passed since the arm was last pulled.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-20 Leonardo Cella , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

The objective of canonical multi-armed bandits is to identify and repeatedly select an arm with the largest reward, often in the form of the expected value of the arm's probability distribution. Such a utilitarian perspective and focus on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-01 Meltem Tatlı , Arpan Mukherjee , Prashanth L. A. , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Ali Tajer

This paper considers the multi-armed thresholding bandit problem -- identifying all arms whose expected rewards are above a predefined threshold via as few pulls (or rounds) as possible -- proposed by Locatelli et al. [2016] recently.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-11 Jie Zhong , Yijun Huang , Ji Liu

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

We consider decentralized restless multi-armed bandit problems with unknown dynamics and multiple players. The reward state of each arm transits according to an unknown Markovian rule when it is played and evolves according to an arbitrary…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2011-02-16 Haoyang Liu , Keqin Liu , Qing Zhao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Avinatan Hassidim , Ron Kupfer , Yaron Singer