Related papers: Pure Exploration in Infinitely-Armed Bandit Models…
We study the federated pure exploration problem of multi-armed bandits and linear bandits, where $M$ agents cooperatively identify the best arm via communicating with the central server. To enhance the robustness against latency and…
We consider a bandit problem where at any time, the decision maker can add new arms to her consideration set. A new arm is queried at a cost from an "arm-reservoir" containing finitely many "arm-types," each characterized by a distinct mean…
This paper introduces the first asymptotically optimal strategy for a multi armed bandit (MAB) model under side constraints. The side constraints model situations in which bandit activations are limited by the availability of certain…
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…
We study the preference-based pure exploration problem for bandits with vector-valued rewards. The rewards are ordered using a (given) preference cone $\mathcal{C}$ and our goal is to identify the set of Pareto optimal arms. First, to…
A Top Two sampling rule for bandit identification is a method which selects the next arm to sample from among two candidate arms, a leader and a challenger. Due to their simplicity and good empirical performance, they have received…
We study the multi-armed bandit problem with arms which are Markov chains with rewards. In the finite-horizon setting, the celebrated Gittins indices do not apply, and the exact solution is intractable. We provide approximation algorithms…
We study the problem of stochastic combinatorial pure exploration (CPE), where an agent sequentially pulls a set of single arms (a.k.a. a super arm) and tries to find the best super arm. Among a variety of problem settings of the CPE, we…
We consider the best-k-arm identification problem for multi-armed bandits, where the objective is to select the exact set of k arms with the highest mean rewards by sequentially allocating measurement effort. We characterize the necessary…
This paper studies a multi-armed bandit (MAB) version of the range-searching problem. In its basic form, range searching considers as input a set of points (on the real line) and a collection of (real) intervals. Here, with each specified…
The restless bandit problem is one of the most well-studied generalizations of the celebrated stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory. In its ultimate generality, the restless bandit problem is known to be PSPACE-Hard to…
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…
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…
We present an efficient and generalised procedure to accurately identify the best (or near best) performing algorithm for each sub-task in a multi-problem domain. Our approach treats this as a set of best arm identification problems for…
Approximate Bayesian computation is an established and popular method for likelihood-free inference with applications in many disciplines. The effectiveness of the method depends critically on the availability of well performing summary…
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…
In this paper, we study a variant of best-arm identification involving elements of risk sensitivity and communication constraints. Specifically, the goal of the learner is to identify the arm with the highest quantile reward, while the…
We introduce a novel multi-armed bandit framework, where each arm is associated with a fixed unknown credal set over the space of outcomes (which can be richer than just the reward). The arm-to-credal-set correspondence comes from a known…
Consider a multi-phase project management problem where the decision maker needs to deal with two issues: (a) how to allocate resources to projects within each phase, and (b) when to enter the next phase, so that the total expected reward…
This paper studies two variants of the best arm identification (BAI) problem under the streaming model, where we have a stream of $n$ arms with reward distributions supported on $[0,1]$ with unknown means. The arms in the stream are…