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Related papers: Best Arm Identification in Spectral Bandits

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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

We study the Stochastic Multi-armed Bandit problem under bounded arm-memory. In this setting, the arms arrive in a stream, and the number of arms that can be stored in the memory at any time, is bounded. The decision-maker can only pull…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-10 Arnab Maiti , Vishakha Patil , Arindam Khan

The best-arm identification (BAI) problem is one of the most fundamental problems in interactive machine learning, which has two flavors: the fixed-budget setting (FB) and the fixed-confidence setting (FC). For $K$-armed bandits with the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-20 Kapilan Balagopalan , Yinan Li , Yao Zhao , Tuan Nguyen , Anton Daitche , Houssam Nassif , Kwang-Sung Jun

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 consider the Max $K$-Armed Bandit problem, where a learning agent is faced with several sources (arms) of items (rewards), and interested in finding the best item overall. At each time step the agent chooses an arm, and obtains a random…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-08-25 Yahel David , Nahum Shimkin

Algorithms for the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem play a central role in sequential decision-making and have been extensively explored both theoretically and numerically. While most classical approaches aim to identify the arm with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Gabriel Turinici

We study the initial beam acquisition problem in millimeter wave (mm-wave) networks from the perspective of best arm identification in multi-armed bandits (MABs). For the stationary environment, we propose a novel algorithm called…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Gourab Ghatak

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

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 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

We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a multi-armed bandit environment when each arm is a time-homogeneous and ergodic discrete-time Markov process on a common, finite state space. The state evolution on each arm is governed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-30 P. N. Karthik , Kota Srinivas Reddy , Vincent Y. F. Tan

The expected improvement (EI) algorithm is a popular strategy for information collection in optimization under uncertainty. The algorithm is widely known to be too greedy, but nevertheless enjoys wide use due to its simplicity and ability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-30 Chao Qin , Diego Klabjan , Daniel Russo

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 the pure exploration problem subject to a matroid constraint (Best-Basis) in a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. In a Best-Basis instance, we are given $n$ stochastic arms with unknown reward distributions, as well as a matroid…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-26 Lijie Chen , Anupam Gupta , Jian Li

We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-17 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Peter L. Bartlett , Victor Gabillon , Alan Malek , Michal Valko

We study fixed-confidence best arm identification in generalized linear bandits under a hybrid feedback model: at each round, the learner may query either (i) absolute reward feedback from a single arm or (ii) relative (dueling) feedback…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Qirun Zeng , Xuchuang Wang , Jiayi Shen , Xutong Liu , Fang Kong , Jinhang Zuo

We study the problem of best-arm identification (BAI) in the fixed-budget setting with heterogeneous reward variances. We propose two variance-adaptive BAI algorithms for this setting: SHVar for known reward variances and SHAdaVar for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Anusha Lalitha , Kousha Kalantari , Yifei Ma , Anoop Deoras , Branislav Kveton

We consider the decentralized exploration problem: a set of players collaborate to identify the best arm by asynchronously interacting with the same stochastic environment. The objective is to insure privacy in the best arm identification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Raphaël Féraud , Réda Alami , Romain Laroche

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 study the multi-fidelity multi-armed bandit (MF-MAB), an extension of the canonical multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem. MF-MAB allows each arm to be pulled with different costs (fidelities) and observation accuracy. We study both the best…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Xuchuang Wang , Qingyun Wu , Wei Chen , John C. S. Lui