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We investigate the problem of batched best arm identification in multi-armed bandits, where we aim to identify the best arm from a set of $n$ arms while minimizing both the number of samples and batches. We introduce an algorithm that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Tianyuan Jin , Qin Zhang , Dongruo Zhou

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

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 consider the problem of near-optimal arm identification in the fixed confidence setting of the infinitely armed bandit problem when nothing is known about the arm reservoir distribution. We (1) introduce a PAC-like framework within which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-22 Maryam Aziz , Jesse Anderton , Emilie Kaufmann , Javed Aslam

We address the problem of identifying the optimal policy with a fixed confidence level in a multi-armed bandit setup, when \emph{the arms are subject to linear constraints}. Unlike the standard best-arm identification problem which is well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Emil Carlsson , Debabrota Basu , Fredrik D. Johansson , Devdatt Dubhashi

In the Best-$k$-Arm problem, we are given $n$ stochastic bandit arms, each associated with an unknown reward distribution. We are required to identify the $k$ arms with the largest means by taking as few samples as possible. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-15 Lijie Chen , Jian Li , Mingda Qiao

Motivated by drug design, we consider the best-arm identification problem in generalized linear bandits. More specifically, we assume each arm has a vector of covariates, there is an unknown vector of parameters that is common across the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Abbas Kazerouni , Lawrence M. Wein

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

This paper investigates the best arm identification (BAI) problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits in the fixed confidence setting. The general class of the exponential family of bandits is considered. The existing algorithms for the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-26 Arpan Mukherjee , Ali Tajer

We consider a variant of the best arm identification task in stochastic multi-armed bandits. Motivated by risk-averse decision-making problems, our goal is to identify a set of $m$ arms with the highest $\tau$-quantile values within a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Mengyan Zhang , Cheng Soon Ong

We study the best arm identification (BEST-1-ARM) problem, which is defined as follows. We are given $n$ stochastic bandit arms. The $i$th arm has a reward distribution $D_i$ with an unknown mean $\mu_{i}$. Upon each play of the $i$th arm,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-24 Lijie Chen , Jian Li

Learning paradigms based purely on offline data as well as those based solely on sequential online learning have been well-studied in the literature. In this paper, we consider combining offline data with online learning, an area less…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Shubhada Agrawal , Sandeep Juneja , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Arun Sai Suggala

We introduce the functional bandit problem, where the objective is to find an arm that optimises a known functional of the unknown arm-reward distributions. These problems arise in many settings such as maximum entropy methods in natural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-05-13 Long Tran-Thanh , Jia Yuan Yu

We study a grouped bandit setting where each arm comprises multiple independent sub-arms referred to as attributes. Each attribute of each arm has an independent stochastic reward. We impose the constraint that for an arm to be deemed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Sahil Dharod , Malyala Preethi Sravani , Sakshi Heda , Sharayu Moharir

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

Over the past few years, the multi-armed bandit model has become increasingly popular in the machine learning community, partly because of applications including online content optimization. This paper reviews two different sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Emilie Kaufmann , Aurélien Garivier

We study the robust best-arm identification problem (RBAI) in the case of linear rewards. The primary objective is to identify a near-optimal robust arm, which involves selecting arms at every round and assessing their robustness by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Wei Wang , Sattar Vakili , Ilija Bogunovic

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 a variant of the best arm identification (BAI) problem in multi-armed bandits (MAB) in which there are two sets of arms (source and target), and the objective is to determine the best target arm while only pulling source arms.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Ojash Neopane , Aaditya Ramdas , Aarti Singh

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