Related papers: Optimal $\delta$-Correct Best-Arm Selection for He…
When an experimenter has the option of running an adaptive trial, is it admissible to ignore this option and run a non-adaptive trial instead? We provide a negative answer to this question in the best-arm identification problem, where the…
We present a time-optimal deterministic distributed algorithm for approximating a minimum weight vertex cover in hypergraphs of rank $f$. This problem is equivalent to the Minimum Weight Set Cover Problem in which the frequency of every…
Given a mixture between two populations of coins, "positive" coins that each have -- unknown and potentially different -- bias $\geq\frac{1}{2}+\Delta$ and "negative" coins with bias $\leq\frac{1}{2}-\Delta$, we consider the task of…
The 1-identification problem is a fundamental pure-exploration problem in multi-armed bandits. An agent aims to determine whether there exists an arm whose mean reward exceeds a known threshold $\mu_0$, or to output \textsf{None} otherwise.…
While experimental design often focuses on selecting the single best alternative from a finite set (e.g., in ranking and selection or best-arm identification), many pure-exploration problems pursue richer goals. Given a specific goal,…
This study investigates the contextual best arm identification (BAI) problem, aiming to design an adaptive experiment to identify the best treatment arm conditioned on contextual information (covariates). We consider a decision-maker who…
Adaptive sampling schemes are well known to create complex dependence that may invalidate conventional inference methods. A recent line of work shows that this need not be the case for UCB-type algorithms in multi-armed bandits. A central…
Learning the minimum/maximum mean among a finite set of distributions is a fundamental sub-task in planning, game tree search and reinforcement learning. We formalize this learning task as the problem of sequentially testing how the minimum…
Recent advances in noiseless non-adaptive group testing have led to a precise asymptotic characterization of the number of tests required for high-probability recovery in the sublinear regime $k = n^{\theta}$ (with $\theta \in (0,1)$), with…
We study best arm identification in a restless multi-armed bandit setting with finitely many arms. The discrete-time data generated by each arm forms a homogeneous Markov chain taking values in a common, finite state space. The state…
We study the problem of Robust Outlier Arm Identification (ROAI), where the goal is to identify arms whose expected rewards deviate substantially from the majority, by adaptively sampling from their reward distributions. We compute the…
We study the fundamental task of outlier-robust mean estimation for heavy-tailed distributions in the presence of sparsity. Specifically, given a small number of corrupted samples from a high-dimensional heavy-tailed distribution whose mean…
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.…
We consider the fixed-budget best arm identification problem where the goal is to find the arm of the largest mean with a fixed number of samples. It is known that the probability of misidentifying the best arm is exponentially small to the…
While the objective in traditional multi-armed bandit problems is to find the arm with the highest mean, in many settings, finding an arm that best captures information about other arms is of interest. This objective, however, requires…
We consider fixed-budget best-arm identification in two-armed Gaussian bandit problems. One of the longstanding open questions is the existence of an optimal strategy under which the probability of misidentification matches a lower bound.…
We propose a {\em novel} piecewise stationary linear bandit (PSLB) model, where the environment randomly samples a context from an unknown probability distribution at each changepoint, and the quality of an arm is measured by its return…
We introduce a framework for proving lower bounds on computational problems over distributions against algorithms that can be implemented using access to a statistical query oracle. For such algorithms, access to the input distribution is…
In the hypothesis selection problem, we are given sample and query access to finite set of candidate distributions (hypotheses), $\mathcal{H} = \{H_1, \ldots, H_n\}$, and samples from an unknown distribution $P$, both over a domain…
We study a problem of best-effort adaptation motivated by several applications and considerations, which consists of determining an accurate predictor for a target domain, for which a moderate amount of labeled samples are available, while…