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We consider best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit problem. Assuming certain continuity conditions of the prior, we characterize the rate of the Bayesian simple regret. Differing from Bayesian regret minimization (Lai, 1987), the…
In the infinite-armed bandit problem, each arm's average reward is sampled from an unknown distribution, and each arm can be sampled further to obtain noisy estimates of the average reward of that arm. Prior work focuses on identifying the…
We introduce vector optimization problems with stochastic bandit feedback, in which preferences among designs are encoded by a polyhedral ordering cone $C$. Our setup generalizes the best arm identification problem to vector-valued rewards…
This paper studies the problem of adaptively sampling from K distributions (arms) in order to identify the largest gap between any two adjacent means. We call this the MaxGap-bandit problem. This problem arises naturally in approximate…
In this paper, we study the problem of estimating uniformly well the mean values of several distributions given a finite budget of samples. If the variance of the distributions were known, one could design an optimal sampling strategy by…
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…
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…
We study the fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) problem in non-stationary linear bandits. Concretely, given a fixed time budget $T\in \mathbb{N}$, finite arm set $\mathcal{X} \subset \mathbb{R}^d$, and a potentially adversarial…
We give a new algorithm for best arm identification in linearly parameterised bandits in the fixed confidence setting. The algorithm generalises the well-known LUCB algorithm of Kalyanakrishnan et al. (2012) by playing an arm which…
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…
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 the problem of best-arm identification with fixed budget in stochastic multi-armed bandits with Bernoulli rewards. For the problem with two arms, also known as the A/B testing problem, we prove that there is no algorithm that (i)…
We propose a new problem setting to study the sequential interactions between a recommender system and a user. Instead of assuming the user is omniscient, static, and explicit, as the classical practice does, we sketch a more realistic user…
We consider the problem of learning the optimal action-value function in the discounted-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). We prove a new PAC bound on the sample-complexity of model-based value iteration algorithm in the presence of…
This work establishes a new upper bound on the number of samples sufficient for PAC learning in the realizable case. The bound matches known lower bounds up to numerical constant factors. This solves a long-standing open problem on the…
We investigate top-$m$ arm identification, a basic problem in bandit theory, in a multi-agent learning model in which agents collaborate to learn an objective function. We are interested in designing collaborative learning algorithms that…
We propose a novel technique for analyzing adaptive sampling called the {\em Simulator}. Our approach differs from the existing methods by considering not how much information could be gathered by any fixed sampling strategy, but how…
We study the problem of sequential learning of the Pareto front in multi-objective multi-armed bandits. An agent is faced with K possible arms to pull. At each turn she picks one, and receives a vector-valued reward. When she thinks she has…
This paper investigates the best arm identification (BAI) problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits in the fixed confidence setting. The general class of the exponential family of bandits is considered. The existing algorithms for the…
We study best-arm identification with fixed confidence in bandit models with graph smoothness constraint. We provide and analyze an efficient gradient ascent algorithm to compute the sample complexity of this problem as a solution of a…