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This paper studies the sample complexity (aka number of comparisons) bounds for the active best-$k$ items selection from pairwise comparisons. From a given set of items, the learner can make pairwise comparisons on every pair of items, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-02 Wenbo Ren , Jia Liu , Ness B. Shroff

We consider online learning problems under a partial observability model capturing situations where the information conveyed to the learner is between full information and bandit feedback. In the simplest variant, we assume that in addition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Tomas Kocak , Gergely Neu , Michal Valko , Remi Munos

Learning of preference models from human feedback has been central to recent advances in artificial intelligence. Motivated by the cost of obtaining high-quality human annotations, we study efficient human preference elicitation for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Anusha Lalitha , Kousha Kalantari , Aniket Deshmukh , Ge Liu , Yifei Ma , Branislav Kveton

Motivated by a natural problem in online model selection with bandit information, we introduce and analyze a best arm identification problem in the rested bandit setting, wherein arm expected losses decrease with the number of times the arm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-08 Leonardo Cella , Claudio Gentile , Massimiliano Pontil

We consider the problem of best arm identification in a variant of multi-armed bandits called linked bandits. In a single interaction with linked bandits, multiple arms are played sequentially until one of them receives a positive reward.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Anant Gupta

A common phenomena in modern recommendation systems is the use of feedback from one user to infer the `value' of an item to other users. This results in an exploration vs. exploitation trade-off, in which items of possibly low value have to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-11-11 Siddhartha Banerjee , Sujay Sanghavi , Sanjay Shakkottai

We consider the problem of best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit model, under fixed confidence. Given a confidence input $\delta$, the goal is to identify the arm with the highest mean reward with a probability of at least 1 --…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-21 El Mehdi Saad , Gilles Blanchard , Nicolas Verzelen

Preference-based feedback is important for many applications in machine learning where evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. Notable recent examples arise in preference alignment for large language models, including in…

In this paper we consider multi-objective reinforcement learning where the objectives are balanced using preferences. In practice, the preferences are often given in an adversarial manner, e.g., customers can be picky in many applications.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Lin F. Yang

Aligning large language models (LLMs) depends on high-quality datasets of human preference labels, which are costly to collect. Although active learning has been studied to improve sample efficiency relative to passive collection, many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yao Zhao , Kwang-Sung Jun

We consider the problem of stochastic $K$-armed dueling bandit in the contextual setting, where at each round the learner is presented with a context set of $K$ items, each represented by a $d$-dimensional feature vector, and the goal of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Aadirupa Saha , Aditya Gopalan

We study the problem of $K$-armed dueling bandit for both stochastic and adversarial environments, where the goal of the learner is to aggregate information through relative preferences of pair of decisions points queried in an online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Aadirupa Saha , Pierre Gaillard

We study the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits with stochastic, potentially private rewards, when the goal is to identify the arm with the highest quantile at a fixed, prescribed level. First, we propose a (non-private)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-06 Kontantinos E. Nikolakakis , Dionysios S. Kalogerias , Or Sheffet , Anand D. Sarwate

We consider the best-k-arm identification problem for multi-armed bandits, where the objective is to select the exact set of k arms with the highest mean rewards by sequentially allocating measurement effort. We characterize the necessary…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Wei You , Chao Qin , Zihao Wang , Shuoguang Yang

This paper considers the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits with semi-bandit feedback and a cardinality constraint on the super-arm size. Existing algorithms for solving this problem typically involve two key sub-routines: (1) a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Arpan Mukherjee , Shashanka Ubaru , Keerthiram Murugesan , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Ali Tajer

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson , Benjamin Recht

This paper considers a multi-armed bandit game where the number of arms is much larger than the maximum budget and is effectively infinite. We characterize necessary and sufficient conditions on the total budget for an algorithm to return…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-15 Maryam Aziz , Kevin Jamieson , Javed Aslam

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

One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

Stochastic multi-armed bandits are a sequential-decision-making framework, where, at each interaction step, the learner selects an arm and observes a stochastic reward. Within the context of best-arm identification (BAI) problems, the goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Riccardo Poiani , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli