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Related papers: Best Arm Identification in Linked Bandits

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We consider a restless multi-armed bandit in which each arm can be in one of two states. When an arm is sampled, the state of the arm is not available to the sampler. Instead, a binary signal with a known randomness that depends on the…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-12-20 Rahul Meshram , D. Manjunath , Aditya Gopalan

We consider the problem of identifying the best arm in stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs) using a fixed sampling budget. Characterizing the minimal instance-specific error probability for this problem constitutes one of the important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Po-An Wang , Ruo-Chun Tzeng , Alexandre Proutiere

We study finite-armed semiparametric bandits, where each arm's reward combines a linear component with an unknown, potentially adversarial shift. This model strictly generalizes classical linear bandits and reflects complexities common in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-18 Seok-Jin Kim , Gi-Soo Kim , Min-hwan Oh

We consider a bandit problem which involves sequential sampling from two populations (arms). Each arm produces a noisy reward realization which depends on an observable random covariate. The goal is to maximize cumulative expected reward.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-03-09 Philippe Rigollet , Assaf Zeevi

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Yuko Kuroki , Liyuan Xu , Atsushi Miyauchi , Junya Honda , Masashi Sugiyama

We study the problem of collaborative best-arm identification in stochastic linear bandits under a fixed-budget scenario. In our learning model, we first consider multiple agents connected through a star network, interacting with a linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Sanjana Agrawal , Saúl A. Blanco

We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Soumya Basu , Orestis Papadigenopoulos , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

We introduce a variant of the classical PAC multi-armed bandit problem. There is an ordered set of $n$ arms $A[1],\dots,A[n]$, each with some stochastic reward drawn from some unknown bounded distribution. The goal is to identify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-11 Albert Cheu , Ravi Sundaram , Jonathan Ullman

We introduce the safe linear stochastic bandit framework---a generalization of linear stochastic bandits---where, in each stage, the learner is required to select an arm with an expected reward that is no less than a predetermined (safe)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-22 Kia Khezeli , Eilyan Bitar

We study best-arm identification in stochastic dueling bandits under the sole assumption that a Condorcet winner exists, i.e., an arm that wins each noisy pairwise comparison with probability at least $1/2$. We introduce a new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-17 El Mehdi Saad , Victor Thuot , Nicolas Verzelen

We study the fixed-confidence best arm identification (BAI) problem within the multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework under the Entropic Value-at-Risk (EVaR) criterion. Our analysis considers a nonparametric setting, allowing for general reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Mehrasa Ahmadipour , Aurélien Garivier

We study the problem of sequential learning of the Pareto front in multi-objective multi-armed bandits. An agent is faced with K possible arms to pull. At each turn she picks one, and receives a vector-valued reward. When she thinks she has…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-30 Elise Crépon , Aurélien Garivier , Wouter M Koolen

This paper focuses on best-arm identification in multi-armed bandits with bounded rewards. We develop an algorithm that is a fusion of lil-UCB and KL-LUCB, offering the best qualities of the two algorithms in one method. This is achieved by…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-09-13 Bob Mankoff , Robert Nowak , Ervin Tanczos

This paper considers a multi-armed bandit game where the number of arms is much larger than the maximum budget and is effectively infinite. We characterize necessary and sufficient conditions on the total budget for an algorithm to return…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-15 Maryam Aziz , Kevin Jamieson , Javed Aslam

We adress the problem of dueling bandits defined on partially ordered sets, or posets. In this setting, arms may not be comparable, and there may be several (incomparable) optimal arms. We propose an algorithm, UnchainedBandits, that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-10 Julien Audiffren , Ralaivola Liva

This paper considers the multi-armed thresholding bandit problem -- identifying all arms whose expected rewards are above a predefined threshold via as few pulls (or rounds) as possible -- proposed by Locatelli et al. [2016] recently.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-11 Jie Zhong , Yijun Huang , Ji Liu

In this paper, we introduce a new online decision making paradigm that we call Thresholding Graph Bandits. The main goal is to efficiently identify a subset of arms in a multi-armed bandit problem whose means are above a specified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-26 Daniel LeJeune , Gautam Dasarathy , Richard G. Baraniuk

In this paper, we consider a multi-armed bandit (MAB) instance and study how to identify the best arm when arm commands are conveyed from a central learner to a distributed agent over a discrete memoryless channel (DMC). Depending on the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Merve Karakas , Osama Hanna , Lin F. Yang , Christina Fragouli

We consider the classic problem of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC learning a best arm where the goal is to identify with confidence $1-\delta$ an arm whose mean is an $\epsilon$-approximation to that of the highest mean arm in a multi-armed bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Avinatan Hassidim , Ron Kupfer , Yaron Singer

We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with non-equivalent multiple plays where, at each step, an agent chooses not only a set of arms, but also their order, which influences reward distribution. In several problem formulations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-20 Aleksandr Vorobev , Gleb Gusev