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Related papers: Good Arm Identification via Bandit Feedback

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In this paper, we study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with graph feedback. Motivated by the clinical trials and recommendation problem, we assume that two arms are connected if and only if they are similar (i.e., their means are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Han Qi , Guo Fei , Li Zhu

This paper studies the problem of identifying any $k$ distinct arms among the top $\rho$ fraction (e.g., top 5\%) of arms from a finite or infinite set with a probably approximately correct (PAC) tolerance $\epsilon$. We consider two cases:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Wenbo Ren , Jia Liu , Ness Shroff

We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-17 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Peter L. Bartlett , Victor Gabillon , Alan Malek , Michal Valko

We consider the continuum-armed bandits problem, under a novel setting of recommending the best arms within a fixed budget under aggregated feedback. This is motivated by applications where the precise rewards are impossible or expensive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Mengyan Zhang , Russell Tsuchida , Cheng Soon Ong

In this paper, we consider a best action identification problem in the stochastic linear bandit setup with a fixed confident constraint. In the considered best action identification problem, instead of minimizing the accumulative regret as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-04 Jun Geng , Lifeng Lai

Identifying the best arm of a multi-armed bandit is a central problem in bandit optimization. We study a quantum computational version of this problem with coherent oracle access to states encoding the reward probabilities of each arm as…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-02-02 Daochen Wang , Xuchen You , Tongyang Li , Andrew M. Childs

The stochastic multi-armed bandit model is a simple abstraction that has proven useful in many different contexts in statistics and machine learning. Whereas the achievable limit in terms of regret minimization is now well known, our aim is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-11-15 Emilie Kaufmann , Olivier Cappé , Aurélien Garivier

We study the Improving Multi-Armed Bandit (IMAB) problem, where the reward obtained from an arm increases with the number of pulls it receives. This model provides an elegant abstraction for many real-world problems in domains such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-22 Vishakha Patil , Vineet Nair , Ganesh Ghalme , Arindam Khan

Mode estimation is a classical problem in statistics with a wide range of applications in machine learning. Despite this, there is little understanding in its robustness properties under possibly adversarial data contamination. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-09 Aldo Pacchiano , Heinrich Jiang , Michael I. Jordan

We introduce Box Thirding (B3), a flexible and efficient algorithm for Best Arm Identification (BAI) under fixed-budget constraints. It is designed for both anytime BAI and scenarios with large N, where the number of arms is too large for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-23 Seohwa Hwang , Junyong Park

We study the problem of best-arm identification in a distributed variant of the multi-armed bandit setting, with a central learner and multiple agents. Each agent is associated with an arm of the bandit, generating stochastic rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-02 Fathima Zarin Faizal , Adway Girish , Manjesh Kumar Hanawal , Nikhil Karamchandani

In the classic Bayesian restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem, there are $N$ arms, with rewards on all arms evolving at each time as Markov chains with known parameters. A player seeks to activate $K \geq 1$ arms at each time in order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2010-11-23 Wenhan Dai , Yi Gai , Bhaskar Krishnamachari , Qing Zhao

Many real-world functions are defined over both categorical and category-specific continuous variables and thus cannot be optimized by traditional Bayesian optimization (BO) methods. To optimize such functions, we propose a new method that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Dang Nguyen , Sunil Gupta , Santu Rana , Alistair Shilton , Svetha Venkatesh

Best arm identification (or, pure exploration) in multi-armed bandits is a fundamental problem in machine learning. In this paper we study the distributed version of this problem where we have multiple agents, and they want to learn the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-02 Chao Tao , Qin Zhang , Yuan Zhou

We present a new algorithm based on an gradient ascent for a general Active Exploration bandit problem in the fixed confidence setting. This problem encompasses several well studied problems such that the Best Arm Identification or…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-21 Pierre Ménard

We propose a novel formulation of group fairness with biased feedback in the contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) setting. In the CMAB setting, a sequential decision maker must, at each time step, choose an arm to pull from a finite set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Candice Schumann , Zhi Lang , Nicholas Mattei , John P. Dickerson

We introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with post-action context, a new BAI problem in a stochastic multi-armed bandit environment and the fixed-confidence setting. The problem addresses the scenarios in which the learner…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Mohammad Shahverdikondori , Amir Mohammad Abouei , Alireza Rezaeimoghadam , Negar Kiyavash

We study the problem of collaborative best-arm identification in stochastic linear bandits under a fixed-budget scenario. In our learning model, we first consider multiple agents connected through a star network, interacting with a linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Sanjana Agrawal , Saúl A. Blanco

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

In this paper, we consider a bandit problem in which there are a number of groups each consisting of infinitely many arms. Whenever a new arm is requested from a given group, its mean reward is drawn from an unknown reservoir distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-02 Ivan Lau , Yan Hao Ling , Mayank Shrivastava , Jonathan Scarlett