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Combinatorial bandits extend the classical bandit framework to settings where the learner selects multiple arms in each round, motivated by applications such as online recommendation and assortment optimization. While extensions of upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Yuxiao Wen , Yanjun Han , Zhengyuan Zhou

We investigate the problem of fixed-budget best arm identification (BAI) for minimizing expected simple regret. In an adaptive experiment, a decision maker draws one of multiple treatment arms based on past observations and observes the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Masahiro Kato , Masaaki Imaizumi , Takuya Ishihara , Toru Kitagawa

In many applications, evaluating the effectiveness of different alternatives comes with varying costs or resource usage. Motivated by such heterogeneity, we study the Best Arm Identification with Resource Constraints (BAIwRC) problem, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

We examine a multi-armed bandit problem with contextual information, where the objective is to ensure that each arm receives a minimum aggregated reward across contexts while simultaneously maximizing the total cumulative reward. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Ahmed Ben Yahmed , Hafedh El Ferchichi , Marc Abeille , Vianney Perchet

We consider bandit problems involving a large (possibly infinite) collection of arms, in which the expected reward of each arm is a linear function of an $r$-dimensional random vector $\mathbf{Z} \in \mathbb{R}^r$, where $r \geq 2$. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2010-02-24 Paat Rusmevichientong , John N. Tsitsiklis

In multi-armed bandit problems, the typical goal is to identify the arm with the highest reward. This paper explores a threshold-based bandit problem, aiming to select an arm based on its relation to a prescribed threshold \(\tau \). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Chanakya Varude , Jay Chaudhary , Siddharth Kaushik , Prasanna Chaporkar

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-05-13 Long Tran-Thanh , Jia Yuan Yu

We consider a constrained, pure exploration, stochastic multi-armed bandit formulation under a fixed budget. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution and is described by multiple attributes that are a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Fathima Zarin Faizal , Jayakrishnan Nair

The classic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem tackles the challenge of accruing maximum reward while making decisions under uncertainty. However, in applications, often the goal is to minimize cost subject to a constraint on the minimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Ishank Juneja , Carlee Joe-Wong , Osman Yağan

Motivated by the need to efficiently identify multiple candidates in high trial-and-error cost tasks such as drug discovery, we propose a near-optimal algorithm to identify all {\epsilon}-best arms (i.e., those at most {\epsilon} worse than…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-02 Zhekai Li , Tianyi Ma , Cheng Hua , Ruihao Zhu

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

Lai and Robbins (1985) and Lai (1987) provided efficient parametric solutions to the multi-armed bandit problem, showing that arm allocation via upper confidence bounds (UCB) achieves minimum regret. These bounds are constructed from the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-01-17 Hock Peng Chan

We introduce the Best Group Identification problem in a multi-objective multi-armed bandit setting, where an agent interacts with groups of arms with vector-valued rewards. The performance of a group is determined by an efficiency vector…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Mohammad Shahverdikondori , Mohammad Reza Badri , Negar Kiyavash

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-16 Jason Altschuler , Victor-Emmanuel Brunel , Alan Malek

Standard Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems assume that the arms are independent. However, in many application scenarios, the information obtained by playing an arm provides information about the remainder of the arms. Hence, in such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-30 Onur Atan , Cem Tekin , Mihaela van der Schaar

The multi-armed bandit(MAB) problem is a simple yet powerful framework that has been extensively studied in the context of decision-making under uncertainty. In many real-world applications, such as robotic applications, selecting an arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Tianpeng Zhang , Kasper Johansson , Na Li

We consider the fixed-budget best arm identification problem where the goal is to find the arm of the largest mean with a fixed number of samples. It is known that the probability of misidentifying the best arm is exponentially small to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-28 Junpei Komiyama , Taira Tsuchiya , Junya Honda

We consider the query recommendation problem in closed loop interactive learning settings like online information gathering and exploratory analytics. The problem can be naturally modelled using the Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework with…

We study the problem of the identification of m arms with largest means under a fixed error rate $\delta$ (fixed-confidence Top-m identification), for misspecified linear bandit models. This problem is motivated by practical applications,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Clémence Réda , Andrea Tirinzoni , Rémy Degenne

We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Soumya Basu , Rajat Sen , Sujay Sanghavi , Sanjay Shakkottai