English
Related papers

Related papers: Identifying Best Interventions through Online Impo…

200 papers

Causal discovery is a fundamental problem with applications spanning various areas in science and engineering. It is well understood that solely using observational data, one can only orient the causal graph up to its Markov equivalence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Zihan Zhou , Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Murat Kocaoglu

Smooth functions on graphs have wide applications in manifold and semi-supervised learning. In this paper, we study a bandit problem where the payoffs of arms are smooth on a graph. This framework is suitable for solving online learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-21 Tomáš Kocák , Michal Valko , Rémi Munos , Branislav Kveton , Shipra Agrawal

We study a graph bandit setting where the objective of the learner is to detect the most influential node of a graph by requesting as little information from the graph as possible. One of the relevant applications for this setting is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Alexandra Carpentier , Michal Valko

We introduce vector optimization problems with stochastic bandit feedback, in which preferences among designs are encoded by a polyhedral ordering cone $C$. Our setup generalizes the best arm identification problem to vector-valued rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Çağın Ararat , Cem Tekin

Combinatorial bandits extend the classical bandit framework to settings where the learner selects multiple arms in each round, motivated by applications such as online recommendation and assortment optimization. While extensions of upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Yuxiao Wen , Yanjun Han , Zhengyuan Zhou

We study pure exploration with infinitely many bandit arms generated i.i.d. from an unknown distribution. Our goal is to efficiently select a single high quality arm whose average reward is, with probability $1-\delta$, within $\varepsilon$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Xiao-Yue Gong , Mark Sellke

Contextual bandit algorithms are commonly used in digital health to recommend personalized treatments. However, to ensure the effectiveness of the treatments, patients are often requested to take actions that have no immediate benefit to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Kyra Gan , Esmaeil Keyvanshokooh , Xueqing Liu , Susan Murphy

Many stochastic optimization algorithms work by estimating the gradient of the cost function on the fly by sampling datapoints uniformly at random from a training set. However, the estimator might have a large variance, which inadvertently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-10 Farnood Salehi , L. Elisa Celis , Patrick Thiran

We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-13 Alexander Luedtke , Emilie Kaufmann , Antoine Chambaz

We design and analyze CascadeBAI, an algorithm for finding the best set of $K$ items, also called an arm, within the framework of cascading bandits. An upper bound on the time complexity of CascadeBAI is derived by overcoming a crucial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Zixin Zhong , Wang Chi Cheung , Vincent Y. F. Tan

Motivated by the task of hyperparameter optimization, we introduce the non-stochastic best-arm identification problem. Within the multi-armed bandit literature, the cumulative regret objective enjoys algorithms and analyses for both the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-02 Kevin Jamieson , Ameet Talwalkar

Top-$2$ methods have become popular in solving the best arm identification (BAI) problem. The best arm, or the arm with the largest mean amongst finitely many, is identified through an algorithm that at any sequential step independently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Agniv Bandyopadhyay , Sandeep Juneja , Shubhada Agrawal

Multi-armed bandit problems are receiving a great deal of attention because they adequately formalize the exploration-exploitation trade-offs arising in several industrially relevant applications, such as online advertisement and, more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-11-05 Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Claudio Gentile , Giovanni Zappella

This paper considers the problem of estimating the unknown intervention targets in a causal directed acyclic graph from observational and interventional data. The focus is on soft interventions in linear structural equation models (SEMs).…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-16 Burak Varici , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Prasanna Sattigeri , Ali Tajer

In order to distribute the best arm identification task as close as possible to the user's devices, on the edge of the Radio Access Network, we propose a new problem setting, where distributed players collaborate to find the best arm. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-03-30 Raphaël Féraud

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

In this paper, we study a variant of best-arm identification involving elements of risk sensitivity and communication constraints. Specifically, the goal of the learner is to identify the arm with the highest quantile reward, while the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Ivan Lau , Jonathan Scarlett

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

Recommendation systems when employed in markets play a dual role: they assist users in selecting their most desired items from a large pool and they help in allocating a limited number of items to the users who desire them the most. Despite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yigit Efe Erginbas , Soham Phade , Kannan Ramchandran

Bandits with feedback graphs are powerful online learning models that interpolate between the full information and classic bandit problems, capturing many real-life applications. A recent work by Zhang et al. (2023) studies the contextual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Mengxiao Zhang , Yuheng Zhang , Haipeng Luo , Paul Mineiro