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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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Shubhada Agrawal , Sandeep Juneja , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Arun Sai Suggala

We study one-sided and $\alpha$-correct sequential hypothesis testing for data generated by an ergodic Markov chain. The null hypothesis is that the unknown transition matrix belongs to a prescribed set $P$ of stochastic matrices, and the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-20 Alhad Sethi , Kavali Sofia Sagar , Shubhada Agrawal , Debabrota Basu , P. N. Karthik

In this paper, we introduce the constrained best mixed arm identification (CBMAI) problem with a fixed budget. This is a pure exploration problem in a stochastic finite armed bandit model. Each arm is associated with a reward and multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Dengwang Tang , Rahul Jain , Ashutosh Nayyar , Pierluigi Nuzzo

A recent line of research focuses on the study of the stochastic multi-armed bandits problem (MAB), in the case where temporal correlations of specific structure are imposed between the player's actions and the reward distributions of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Orestis Papadigenopoulos , Constantine Caramanis

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Recep Can Yavas , Vincent Y. F. Tan

We consider the problem of distributed online learning with multiple players in multi-armed bandits (MAB) models. Each player can pick among multiple arms. When a player picks an arm, it gets a reward. We consider both i.i.d. reward model…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-11-18 Dileep Kalathil , Naumaan Nayyar , Rahul Jain

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

Mode estimation is a classical problem in statistics with a wide range of applications in machine learning. Despite this, there is little understanding in its robustness properties under possibly adversarial data contamination. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-09 Aldo Pacchiano , Heinrich Jiang , Michael I. Jordan

We consider a stochastic continuum armed bandit problem where the arms are indexed by the $\ell_2$ ball $B_{d}(1+\nu)$ of radius $1+\nu$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$. The reward functions $r :B_{d}(1+\nu) \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ are considered to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-31 Hemant Tyagi , Sebastian Stich , Bernd Gärtner

We consider the problem of finding, through adaptive sampling, which of $n$ options (arms) has the largest mean. Our objective is to determine a rule which identifies the best arm with a fixed minimum confidence using as few observations as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-17 MohammadJavad Azizi , Sheldon M Ross , Zhengyu Zhang

We study the problem of online clustering of data sequences in the multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework under the fixed-confidence setting. There are $M$ arms, each providing i.i.d. samples from a parametric distribution whose parameters are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 G Dhinesh Chandran , Srinivas Reddy Kota , Srikrishna Bhashyam

Multi-armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms identify the best arm among multiple arms via exploration-exploitation trade-off without prior knowledge of arm statistics. Their usefulness in wireless radio, IoT, and robotics demand deployment on edge…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-06-08 S. V. Sai Santosh , Sumit J. Darak

We study the stochastic linear bandit problem with multiple arms over $T$ rounds, where the covariate dimension $d$ may exceed $T$, but each arm-specific parameter vector is $s$-sparse. We begin by analyzing the sequential estimation…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-05-26 Jingyu Liu , Yanglei Song

The multi-armed restless bandit framework allows to model a wide variety of decision-making problems in areas as diverse as industrial engineering, computer communication, operations research, financial engineering, communication networks…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-27 Urtzi Ayesta , Manu K. Gupta , Ina Maria Verloop

Multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a class of online learning problems where a learning agent aims to maximize its expected cumulative reward while repeatedly selecting to pull arms with unknown reward distributions. We consider a scenario where…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-25 Yang Cao , Zheng Wen , Branislav Kveton , Yao Xie

We study the Bandit Clustering (BC) problem under the fixed confidence setting, where the objective is to group a collection of data sequences (arms) into clusters through sequential sampling from adaptively selected arms at each time step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 G Dhinesh Chandran , Kota Srinivas Reddy , Srikrishna Bhashyam

Multi-arm bandits are gaining popularity as they enable real-world sequential decision-making across application areas, including clinical trials, recommender systems, and online decision-making. Consequently, there is an increased desire…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-03-01 Dae Woong Ham , Iavor Bojinov , Michael Lindon , Martin Tingley

Top Two algorithms arose as an adaptation of Thompson sampling to best arm identification in multi-armed bandit models (Russo, 2016), for parametric families of arms. They select the next arm to sample from by randomizing among two…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-05 Marc Jourdan , Rémy Degenne , Dorian Baudry , Rianne de Heide , Emilie Kaufmann

Motivated by applications in computational advertising and systems biology, we consider the problem of identifying the best out of several possible soft interventions at a source node $V$ in an acyclic causal directed graph, to maximize the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-13 Rajat Sen , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Alexandros G. Dimakis , Sanjay Shakkottai