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Related papers: Good Arm Identification via Bandit Feedback

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This paper considers a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem with dual objectives: (i) quick identification and commitment to the optimal arm, and (ii) reward maximization throughout a sequence of $T$ consecutive rounds. Though each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

We focus on the problem of best-arm identification in a stochastic multi-arm bandit with temporally decreasing variances for the arms' rewards. We model arm rewards as Gaussian random variables with fixed means and variances that decrease…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Tamojeet Roychowdhury , Kota Srinivas Reddy , Krishna P Jagannathan , Sharayu Moharir

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

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

In this paper, we consider a new Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem where arms are nodes in an unknown and possibly changing graph, and the agent (i) initiates random walks over the graph by pulling arms, (ii) observes the random walk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Tianyu Wang , Lin F. Yang , Zizhuo Wang

We consider the problem of finding, through adaptive sampling, which of $n$ options (arms) has the largest mean. Our objective is to determine a rule which identifies the best arm with a fixed minimum confidence using as few observations as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-17 MohammadJavad Azizi , Sheldon M Ross , Zhengyu Zhang

We consider the Max $K$-Armed Bandit problem, where a learning agent is faced with several sources (arms) of items (rewards), and interested in finding the best item overall. At each time step the agent chooses an arm, and obtains a random…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-08-25 Yahel David , Nahum Shimkin

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

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 formulate, analyze and solve the problem of best arm identification with fairness constraints on subpopulations (BAICS). Standard best arm identification problems aim at selecting an arm that has the largest expected reward where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Yuhang Wu , Zeyu Zheng , Tingyu Zhu

We consider the Max $K$-Armed Bandit problem, where a learning agent is faced with several stochastic arms, each a source of i.i.d. rewards of unknown distribution. At each time step the agent chooses an arm, and observes the reward of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-25 Yahel David , Nahum Shimkin

We address the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with a fixed budget for two-armed Gaussian bandits. In BAI, given multiple arms, we aim to find the best arm, an arm with the highest expected reward, through an adaptive experiment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Masahiro Kato

We study best arm identification (BAI) in linear bandits in the fixed-budget regime under differential privacy constraints, when the arm rewards are supported on the unit interval. Given a finite budget $T$ and a privacy parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Zhirui Chen , P. N. Karthik , Yeow Meng Chee , Vincent Y. F. Tan

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 consider the problem of identifying the best arm in a multi-armed bandit model. Despite a wealth of literature in the traditional fixed budget and fixed confidence regimes of the best arm identification problem, it still remains a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-08 Michael O. Harding , Kirthevasan Kandasamy

We study the best-arm identification (BAI) problem with a fixed budget and contextual (covariate) information. In each round of an adaptive experiment, after observing contextual information, we choose a treatment arm using past…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Masahiro Kato , Masaaki Imaizumi , Takuya Ishihara , Toru Kitagawa

This study investigates the experimental design problem for identifying the arm with the highest expected outcome, referred to as best arm identification (BAI). In our experiments, the number of treatment-allocation rounds is fixed. During…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-03-12 Masahiro Kato

In multi-armed bandit problems, the typical goal is to identify the arm with the highest reward. This paper explores a threshold-based bandit problem, aiming to select an arm based on its relation to a prescribed threshold \(\tau \). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Chanakya Varude , Jay Chaudhary , Siddharth Kaushik , Prasanna Chaporkar

We consider a stochastic bandit problem with a possibly infinite number of arms. We write $p^*$ for the proportion of optimal arms and $\Delta$ for the minimal mean-gap between optimal and sub-optimal arms. We characterize the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Rianne de Heide , James Cheshire , Pierre Ménard , Alexandra Carpentier

We study the problem of best arm identification in linear bandits in the fixed-budget setting. By leveraging properties of the G-optimal design and incorporating it into the arm allocation rule, we design a parameter-free algorithm, Optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-22 Junwen Yang , Vincent Y. F. Tan