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Pure exploration in bandits formalises multiple real-world problems, such as tuning hyper-parameters or conducting user studies to test a set of items, where different safety, resource, and fairness constraints on the decision space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Udvas Das , Debabrota Basu

We describe a general technique that yields the first {\em Statistical Query lower bounds} for a range of fundamental high-dimensional learning problems involving Gaussian distributions. Our main results are for the problems of (1) learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-18 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Alistair Stewart

We study an online stochastic matching problem in which an algorithm sequentially matches $U$ users to $K$ arms, aiming to maximize cumulative reward over $T$ rounds under budget constraints. Without structural assumptions, computing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Omer Ben-Porat , Gur Keinan , Rotem Torkan

In the classic multi-armed bandits problem, the goal is to have a policy for dynamically operating arms that each yield stochastic rewards with unknown means. The key metric of interest is regret, defined as the gap between the expected…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2010-11-23 Yi Gai , Bhaskar Krishnamachari , Rahul Jain

Contextual multi-armed bandits (CMAB) have been widely used for learning to filter and prioritize information according to a user's interest. In this work, we analyze top-K ranking under the CMAB framework where the top-K arms are chosen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-31 Michael Rawson , Jade Freeman

A core element in decision-making under uncertainty is the feedback on the quality of the performed actions. However, in many applications, such feedback is restricted. For example, in recommendation systems, repeatedly asking the user to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Yonathan Efroni , Nadav Merlis , Aadirupa Saha , Shie Mannor

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

Pure exploration in multi-armed bandits has emerged as an important framework for modeling decision-making and search under uncertainty. In modern applications, however, one is often faced with a tremendously large number of options. Even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Parth K. Thaker , Mohit Malu , Nikhil Rao , Gautam Dasarathy

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

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

The combinatorial stochastic semi-bandit problem is an extension of the classical multi-armed bandit problem in which an algorithm pulls more than one arm at each stage and the rewards of all pulled arms are revealed. One difference with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-07 Rémy Degenne , Vianney Perchet

Information-directed sampling (IDS) is a powerful framework for solving bandit problems which has shown strong results in both Bayesian and frequentist settings. However, frequentist IDS, like many other bandit algorithms, requires that one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-10 Piotr M. Suder , Eric Laber

In this paper we study a generalized version of classical multi-armed bandits (MABs) problem by allowing for arbitrary constraints on constituent bandits at each decision point. The motivation of this study comes from many situations that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-07 Xiang-yang Li , Shaojie Tang , Yaqin Zhou

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

In this paper, we introduce a multi-armed bandit problem termed max-min grouped bandits, in which the arms are arranged in possibly-overlapping groups, and the goal is to find the group whose worst arm has the highest mean reward. This…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-16 Zhenlin Wang , Jonathan Scarlett

We consider a combinatorial generalization of the classical multi-armed bandit problem that is defined as follows. There is a given bipartite graph of $M$ users and $N \geq M$ resources. For each user-resource pair $(i,j)$, there is an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-03-17 Yi Gai , Bhaskar Krishnamachari , Mingyan Liu

Sequential decision-making under uncertainty often involves multiple agents learning which actions (arms) yield the highest rewards through repeated interaction with a stochastic environment. This setting is commonly modeled by cooperative…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-25 Evagoras Makridis , Themistoklis Charalambous

Maximum weight matching is one of the most fundamental combinatorial optimization problems with a wide range of applications in data mining and bioinformatics. Developing distributed weighted matching algorithms is challenging due to the…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2019-06-06 Sepehr Assadi , MohammadHossein Bateni , Vahab Mirrokni

We study the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits with stochastic, potentially private rewards, when the goal is to identify the arm with the highest quantile at a fixed, prescribed level. First, we propose a (non-private)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-06 Kontantinos E. Nikolakakis , Dionysios S. Kalogerias , Or Sheffet , Anand D. Sarwate

Bayesian models offer great flexibility for clustering applications---Bayesian nonparametrics can be used for modeling infinite mixtures, and hierarchical Bayesian models can be utilized for sharing clusters across multiple data sets. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-15 Brian Kulis , Michael I. Jordan