Related papers: Towards Optimal and Efficient Best Arm Identificat…
We consider the fixed-confidence best arm identification (FC-BAI) problem in the Bayesian setting. This problem aims to find the arm of the largest mean with a fixed confidence level when the bandit model has been sampled from the known…
We provide a simple method to combine stochastic bandit algorithms. Our approach is based on a "meta-UCB" procedure that treats each of $N$ individual bandit algorithms as arms in a higher-level $N$-armed bandit problem that we solve with a…
We consider a Kullback-Leibler-based algorithm for the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in the case of distributions with finite supports (not necessarily known beforehand), whose asymptotic regret matches the lower bound of…
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…
Learning paradigms based purely on offline data as well as those based solely on sequential online learning have been well-studied in the literature. In this paper, we consider combining offline data with online learning, an area less…
Identifying the best arm of a multi-armed bandit is a central problem in bandit optimization. We study a quantum computational version of this problem with coherent oracle access to states encoding the reward probabilities of each arm as…
We study the problem of identifying the top $m$ arms in a multi-armed bandit game. Our proposed solution relies on a new algorithm based on successive rejects of the seemingly bad arms, and successive accepts of the good ones. This…
We study the best-arm identification problem in sparse linear bandits under the fixed-budget setting. In sparse linear bandits, the unknown feature vector $\theta^*$ may be of large dimension $d$, but only a few, say $s \ll d$ of these…
In this work, we address the open problem of finding low-complexity near-optimal multi-armed bandit algorithms for sequential decision making problems. Existing bandit algorithms are either sub-optimal and computationally simple (e.g.,…
This paper considers a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem with dual objectives: (i) quick identification and commitment to the optimal arm, and (ii) reward maximization throughout a sequence of $T$ consecutive rounds. Though each…
We study the Pareto frontier of two archetypal objectives in multi-armed bandits, namely, regret minimization (RM) and best arm identification (BAI) with a fixed horizon. It is folklore that the balance between exploitation and exploration…
Fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) is a bandit problem where the agent maximizes the probability of identifying the optimal arm within a fixed budget of observations. In this work, we study this problem in the Bayesian setting. We…
We consider a variant of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call multi-armed bandit problem with known trend, where the gambler knows the shape of the reward function of each arm but not its distribution. This new problem is motivated…
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…
We study fixed-confidence Best Arm Identification (BAI) in semiparametric bandits, where rewards are linear in arm features plus an unknown additive baseline shift. Unlike linear-bandit BAI, this setting requires orthogonalized regression,…
We introduce the functional bandit problem, where the objective is to find an arm that optimises a known functional of the unknown arm-reward distributions. These problems arise in many settings such as maximum entropy methods in natural…
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…
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 propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…
In this paper we propose the Augmented-UCB (AugUCB) algorithm for a fixed-budget version of the thresholding bandit problem (TBP), where the objective is to identify a set of arms whose quality is above a threshold. A key feature of AugUCB…