English
Related papers

Related papers: Pure Exploration in Infinitely-Armed Bandit Models…

200 papers

We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a multi-armed bandit environment when each arm is a time-homogeneous and ergodic discrete-time Markov process on a common, finite state space. The state evolution on each arm is governed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-30 P. N. Karthik , Kota Srinivas Reddy , Vincent Y. F. Tan

We consider the problem of identifying the best arm in a multi-armed bandit model. Despite a wealth of literature in the traditional fixed budget and fixed confidence regimes of the best arm identification problem, it still remains a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-08 Michael O. Harding , Kirthevasan Kandasamy

We present a two-armed bandit model of decision making under uncertainty where the expected return to investing in the "risky arm" increases when choosing that arm and decreases when choosing the "safe" arm. These dynamics are natural in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-03-22 Roland Fryer , Philipp Harms

We address the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with a fixed budget for two-armed Gaussian bandits. In BAI, given multiple arms, we aim to find the best arm, an arm with the highest expected reward, through an adaptive experiment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Masahiro Kato

In good arm identification (GAI), the goal is to identify one arm whose average performance exceeds a given threshold, referred to as a good arm, if it exists. Few works have studied GAI in the fixed-budget setting when the sampling budget…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-08 Marc Jourdan , Andrée Delahaye-Duriez , Clémence Réda

Elimination algorithms for bandit identification, which prune the plausible correct answers sequentially until only one remains, are computationally convenient since they reduce the problem size over time. However, existing elimination…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Andrea Tirinzoni , Rémy Degenne

We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator. Existing approaches to the related problem of inverse reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-23 Wenshuo Guo , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Aditya Grover , Vidya Muthukumar , Ashwin Pananjady

This work addresses the problem of regret minimization in non-stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, focusing on performance guarantees that hold with high probability. Such results are rather scarce in the literature since proving them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-04 Gergely Neu

We address the problem of finding the maximizer of a nonlinear smooth function, that can only be evaluated point-wise, subject to constraints on the number of permitted function evaluations. This problem is also known as fixed-budget best…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-11-12 Matthew W. Hoffman , Bobak Shahriari , Nando de Freitas

This work investigates the problem of best arm identification for multi-agent multi-armed bandits. We consider $N$ agents grouped into $M$ clusters, where each cluster solves a stochastic bandit problem. The mapping between agents and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Yash , Nikhil Karamchandani , Avishek Ghosh

In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

We design and analyze CascadeBAI, an algorithm for finding the best set of $K$ items, also called an arm, within the framework of cascading bandits. An upper bound on the time complexity of CascadeBAI is derived by overcoming a crucial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Zixin Zhong , Wang Chi Cheung , Vincent Y. F. Tan

This paper addresses the exploration-exploitation dilemma inherent in decision-making, focusing on multi-armed bandit problems. The problems involve an agent deciding whether to exploit current knowledge for immediate gains or explore new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-06 Alex Barbier-Chebbah , Christian L. Vestergaard , Jean-Baptiste Masson

We study stochastic linear optimization problem with bandit feedback. The set of arms take values in an $N$-dimensional space and belong to a bounded polyhedron described by finitely many linear inequalities. We provide a lower bound for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-29 Manjesh K. Hanawal , Amir Leshem , Venkatesh Saligrama

We consider a stochastic bandit problem with countably many arms that belong to a finite set of types, each characterized by a unique mean reward. In addition, there is a fixed distribution over types which sets the proportion of each type…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Anand Kalvit , Assaf Zeevi

Algorithms for hyperparameter optimization abound, all of which work well under different and often unverifiable assumptions. Motivated by the general challenge of sequentially choosing which algorithm to use, we study the more specific…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-04-12 Robert Nishihara , David Lopez-Paz , Léon Bottou

This paper studies the problem of adaptively sampling from K distributions (arms) in order to identify the largest gap between any two adjacent means. We call this the MaxGap-bandit problem. This problem arises naturally in approximate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-04 Sumeet Katariya , Ardhendu Tripathy , Robert Nowak

In this paper, we introduce the notion of replicable policies in the context of stochastic bandits, one of the canonical problems in interactive learning. A policy in the bandit environment is called replicable if it pulls, with high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Hossein Esfandiari , Alkis Kalavasis , Amin Karbasi , Andreas Krause , Vahab Mirrokni , Grigoris Velegkas

This paper presents a comprehensive study on the problem of Best Arm Retention (BAR), which has recently found applications in streaming algorithms for multi-armed bandits. In the BAR problem, the goal is to retain $m$ arms with the best…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Houshuang Chen , Yuchen He , Chihao Zhang

Classical multi-armed bandit problems use the expected value of an arm as a metric to evaluate its goodness. However, the expected value is a risk-neutral metric. In many applications like finance, one is interested in balancing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Anmol Kagrecha , Jayakrishnan Nair , Krishna Jagannathan