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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

We study the problem of selecting $K$ arms with the highest expected rewards in a stochastic $n$-armed bandit game. This problem has a wide range of applications, e.g., A/B testing, crowdsourcing, simulation optimization. Our goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Jiecao Chen , Xi Chen , Qin Zhang , Yuan Zhou

In bandit best-arm identification, an algorithm is tasked with finding the arm with highest mean reward with a specified accuracy as fast as possible. We study multi-fidelity best-arm identification, in which the algorithm can choose to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Riccardo Poiani , Rémy Degenne , Emilie Kaufmann , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. Given a set of $n$ arms indexed from $1$ to $n$, each arm $i$ is associated with an unknown reward distribution supported on $[0,1]$ with mean…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Pinyan Lu , Chao Tao , Xiaojin Zhang

In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Adrienne Tuynman , Rémy Degenne

Recently multi-armed bandit problem arises in many real-life scenarios where arms must be sampled in batches, due to limited time the agent can wait for the feedback. Such applications include biological experimentation and online…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-22 Shengyu Cao , Simai He , Ruoqing Jiang , Jin Xu , Hongsong Yuan

We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit problem called {\em good arm identification} (GAI), where a good arm is defined as an arm with expected reward greater than or equal to a given threshold. GAI is a pure-exploration problem…

We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Kota Srinivas Reddy , P. N. Karthik , Nikhil Karamchandani , Jayakrishnan Nair

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

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

Given a finite set of unknown distributions or arms that can be sampled, we consider the problem of identifying the one with the maximum mean using a $\delta$-correct algorithm (an adaptive, sequential algorithm that restricts the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Shubhada Agrawal , Sandeep Juneja , Peter Glynn

We study the problem of the identification of m arms with largest means under a fixed error rate $\delta$ (fixed-confidence Top-m identification), for misspecified linear bandit models. This problem is motivated by practical applications,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Clémence Réda , Andrea Tirinzoni , Rémy Degenne

We consider a stochastic bandit problem with a possibly infinite number of arms. We write $p^*$ for the proportion of optimal arms and $\Delta$ for the minimal mean-gap between optimal and sub-optimal arms. We characterize the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Rianne de Heide , James Cheshire , Pierre Ménard , Alexandra Carpentier

We study the combinatorial pure exploration problem Best-Set in stochastic multi-armed bandits. In a Best-Set instance, we are given $n$ arms with unknown reward distributions, as well as a family $\mathcal{F}$ of feasible subsets over the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Lijie Chen , Anupam Gupta , Jian Li , Mingda Qiao , Ruosong Wang

Motivated by an open direction in existing literature, we study the 1-identification problem, a fundamental multi-armed bandit formulation on pure exploration. The goal is to determine whether there exists an arm whose mean reward is at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

This paper investigates the problem of best arm identification in $\textit{contaminated}$ stochastic multi-arm bandits. In this setting, the rewards obtained from any arm are replaced by samples from an adversarial model with probability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Arpan Mukherjee , Ali Tajer , Pin-Yu Chen , Payel Das

We consider a good arm identification problem in a stochastic bandit setting with multi-objectives, where each arm $i \in [K]$ is associated with a distribution $D_i$ defined over $R^M$. For each round $t$, the player pulls an arm $i_t$ and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Xuanke Jiang , Sherief Hashima , Kohei Hatano , Eiji Takimoto

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 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

This paper studies active learning in the context of robust statistics. Specifically, we propose a variant of the Best Arm Identification problem for \emph{contaminated bandits}, where each arm pull has probability $\varepsilon$ of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-16 Jason Altschuler , Victor-Emmanuel Brunel , Alan Malek