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Adaptive experiments are used extensively in online platforms, healthcare and biotechnology, and a variety of other settings. In many of these applications, the main goal is not to precisely estimate a treatment effect, but to demonstrate…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Guido Imbens , Lorenzo Masoero , Alexander Rakhlin , Thomas S. Richardson , Suhas Vijaykumar

The challenge of identifying the best feasible arm within a fixed budget has attracted considerable interest in recent years. However, a notable gap remains in the literature: the exact exponential rate at which the error probability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Jie Bian , Vincent Y. F. Tan

We consider a multi-armed bandit setting with finitely many arms, in which each arm yields an $M$-dimensional vector reward upon selection. We assume that the reward of each dimension (a.k.a. {\em objective}) is generated independently of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Zhirui Chen , P. N. Karthik , Yeow Meng Chee , Vincent Y. F. Tan

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

In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Adrienne Tuynman , Rémy Degenne

We study the constrained variant of the \emph{multi-armed bandit} (MAB) problem, in which the learner aims not only at minimizing the total loss incurred during the learning dynamic, but also at controlling the violation of multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Francesco Emanuele Stradi , Kalana Kalupahana , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

In this paper, we address the problem of identifying the Pareto Set under feasibility constraints in a multivariate bandit setting. Specifically, given a $K$-armed bandit with unknown means $\mu_1, \dots, \mu_K \in \mathbb{R}^d$, the goal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-11 Cyrille Kone , Emilie Kaufmann , Laura Richert

Elimination algorithms for bandit identification, which prune the plausible correct answers sequentially until only one remains, are computationally convenient since they reduce the problem size over time. However, existing elimination…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Andrea Tirinzoni , Rémy Degenne

We study a regret minimization problem with the existence of multiple best/near-optimal arms in the multi-armed bandit setting. We consider the case when the number of arms/actions is comparable or much larger than the time horizon, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-23 Yinglun Zhu , Robert Nowak

We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Kota Srinivas Reddy , P. N. Karthik , Nikhil Karamchandani , Jayakrishnan Nair

Sampling is a fundamental problem in computer science and statistics. However, for a given task and stream, it is often not possible to choose good sampling probabilities in advance. We derive a general framework for adaptively changing the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-16 Daniel Ting

We propose a new strategy for best-arm identification with fixed confidence of Gaussian variables with bounded means and unit variance. This strategy, called Exploration-Biased Sampling, is not only asymptotically optimal: it is to the best…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-08 Antoine Barrier , Aurélien Garivier , Tomáš Kocák

We design new algorithms for the combinatorial pure exploration problem in the multi-arm bandit framework. In this problem, we are given $K$ distributions and a collection of subsets $\mathcal{V} \subset 2^{[K]}$ of these distributions, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-29 Tongyi Cao , Akshay Krishnamurthy

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Lijie Chen , Anupam Gupta , Jian Li , Mingda Qiao , Ruosong Wang

This paper studies the fixed-confidence best arm identification (BAI) problem in the bandit framework in the canonical single-parameter exponential models. For this problem, many policies have been proposed, but most of them require solving…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-12 Jongyeong Lee , Junya Honda , Masashi Sugiyama

We study the minimax sample complexity of $\varepsilon$-best arm identification in linear bandits. Given a compact action set $\mathcal{X}$ that spans $\mathbb{R}^d$ and an unknown reward vector $\theta\in\mathbb{R}^d$, the goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Arnab Maiti , Yunbei Xu , Kevin Jamieson

We consider the combinatorial bandits problem with semi-bandit feedback under finite sampling budget constraints, in which the learner can carry out its action only for a limited number of times specified by an overall budget. The action is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Jasmin Brandt , Viktor Bengs , Björn Haddenhorst , Eyke Hüllermeier

We study best-arm identification in stochastic multi-armed bandits under the fixed-confidence setting, focusing on instances with multiple optimal arms. Unlike prior work that addresses the unknown-number-of-optimal-arms case, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Lan V. Truong

We establish an asymptotic framework for the statistical analysis of the stochastic contextual multi-armed bandit problem (CMAB), which is widely employed in adaptively randomized experiments across various fields. While algorithms for…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-05-21 Ramon van den Akker , Bas J. M. Werker , Bo Zhou

Drawing a sample from a discrete distribution is one of the building components for Monte Carlo methods. Like other sampling algorithms, discrete sampling suffers from the high computational burden in large-scale inference problems. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-04-29 Yutian Chen , Zoubin Ghahramani