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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

In machine learning, the notion of multi-armed bandits refers to a class of online learning problems, in which an agent is supposed to simultaneously explore and exploit a given set of choice alternatives in the course of a sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Viktor Bengs , Robert Busa-Fekete , Adil El Mesaoudi-Paul , Eyke Hüllermeier

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

An extension of the traditional two-armed bandit problem is considered, in which the decision maker has access to some side information before deciding which arm to pull. At each time t, before making a selection, the decision maker is able…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2007-07-16 Chih-Chun Wang , Sanjeev R. Kulkarni , H. Vincent Poor

This paper introduces the framework of multi-armed sampling, which serves as the sampling counterpart to the optimization problem of multi-armed bandits. Our primary motivation is to rigorously examine the exploration-exploitation trade-off…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Mohammad Pedramfar , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

We study stochastic multi-armed bandits under simultaneous constraints on space and adaptivity: the learner interacts with the environment in $B$ batches and has only $W$ bits of persistent memory. Prior work shows that each constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Ruiyuan Huang , Zicheng Lyu , Xiaoyi Zhu , Zengfeng Huang

We consider the problem of pure exploration with subset-wise preference feedback, which contains $N$ arms with features. The learner is allowed to query subsets of size $K$ and receives feedback in the form of a noisy winner. The goal of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Shubham Gupta , Aadirupa Saha , Sumeet Katariya

Contextual bandits are online learners that, given an input, select an arm and receive a reward for that arm. They use the reward as a learning signal and aim to maximize the total reward over the inputs. Contextual bandits are commonly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Awni Hannun , Brian Knott , Shubho Sengupta , Laurens van der Maaten

We consider a collaborative online learning paradigm, wherein a group of agents connected through a social network are engaged in playing a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. Each time an agent takes an action, the corresponding reward is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-12 Ravi Kumar Kolla , Krishna Jagannathan , Aditya Gopalan

The stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a common model for sequential decision problems. In the standard setup, a decision maker has to choose at every instant between several competing arms, each of them provides a scalar random…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-27 Asaf Cassel , Shie Mannor , Assaf Zeevi

We study human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (RL) with trajectory preferences, where instead of receiving a numeric reward at each step, the agent only receives preferences over trajectory pairs from a human overseer. The goal of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Xiaoyu Chen , Han Zhong , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Liwei Wang

In this paper, we study the multi-objective bandits (MOB) problem, where a learner repeatedly selects one arm to play and then receives a reward vector consisting of multiple objectives. MOB has found many real-world applications as varied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Shiyin Lu , Guanghui Wang , Yao Hu , Lijun Zhang

We study the multi-player stochastic multiarmed bandit (MAB) problem in an abruptly changing environment. We consider a collision model in which a player receives reward at an arm if it is the only player to select the arm. We design two…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-14 Lai Wei , Vaibhav Srivastava

During probabilistic learning organisms often apply a sub-optimal "probability-matching" strategy, where selection rates match reward probabilities, rather than engaging in the optimal "maximization" strategy, where the option with the…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2021-12-09 Liran Szlak , Kristoffer Aberg , Rony Paz

It is well known that in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB), the sample mean of an arm is typically not an unbiased estimator of its true mean. In this paper, we decouple three different sources of this selection bias: adaptive…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-10-29 Jaehyeok Shin , Aaditya Ramdas , Alessandro Rinaldo

This study investigates the contextual best arm identification (BAI) problem, aiming to design an adaptive experiment to identify the best treatment arm conditioned on contextual information (covariates). We consider a decision-maker who…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Masahiro Kato , Kyohei Okumura , Takuya Ishihara , Toru Kitagawa

The framework of feedback graphs is a generalization of sequential decision-making with bandit or full information feedback. In this work, we study an extension where the directed feedback graph is stochastic, following a distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Emmanuel Esposito , Federico Fusco , Dirk van der Hoeven , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

We study finite-armed stochastic bandits where the rewards of each arm might be correlated to those of other arms. We introduce a novel phased algorithm that exploits the given structure to build confidence sets over the parameters of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Andrea Tirinzoni , Alessandro Lazaric , Marcello Restelli

We consider a resource-aware variant of the classical multi-armed bandit problem: In each round, the learner selects an arm and determines a resource limit. It then observes a corresponding (random) reward, provided the (random) amount of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Viktor Bengs , Eyke Hüllermeier

We consider regret minimization in a general collaborative multi-agent multi-armed bandit model, in which each agent faces a finite set of arms and may communicate with other agents through a central controller. The optimal arm for each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Amitis Shidani , Sattar Vakili