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In this paper, we study a variant of best-arm identification involving elements of risk sensitivity and communication constraints. Specifically, the goal of the learner is to identify the arm with the highest quantile reward, while the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Ivan Lau , Jonathan Scarlett

A standard assumption in contextual multi-arm bandit is that the true context is perfectly known before arm selection. Nonetheless, in many practical applications (e.g., cloud resource management), prior to arm selection, the context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Jianyi Yang , Shaolei Ren

Stochastic multi-agent multi-armed bandits typically assume that the rewards from each arm follow a fixed distribution, regardless of which agent pulls the arm. However, in many real-world settings, rewards can depend on the sensitivity of…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Lucia Gordon , Esther Rolf , Milind Tambe

We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Sharan Vaswani , Abbas Mehrabian , Audrey Durand , Branislav Kveton

Decision making under uncertain environments in the maximization of expected reward while minimizing its risk is one of the ubiquitous problems in many subjects. Here, we introduce a novel problem setting in stochastic bandit optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Shunta Nonaga , Koji Tabata , Yuta Mizuno , Tamiki Komatsuzaki

We address the problem of identifying the optimal policy with a fixed confidence level in a multi-armed bandit setup, when \emph{the arms are subject to linear constraints}. Unlike the standard best-arm identification problem which is well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Emil Carlsson , Debabrota Basu , Fredrik D. Johansson , Devdatt Dubhashi

We consider a multi-armed bandit setting in which each arm has a public and a private reward distribution. An observer expects an agent to follow Thompson Sampling according to the public rewards, however, the deceptive agent aims to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 I. Arda Vurankaya , Mustafa O. Karabag , Wesley A. Suttle , Jesse Milzman , David Fridovich-Keil , Ufuk Topcu

Best arm identification (BAI) aims to identify the highest-performance arm among a set of $K$ arms by collecting stochastic samples from each arm. In real-world problems, the best arm needs to satisfy additional feasibility constraints.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Ting Cai , Kirthevasan Kandasamy

We consider the problem of near-optimal arm identification in the fixed confidence setting of the infinitely armed bandit problem when nothing is known about the arm reservoir distribution. We (1) introduce a PAC-like framework within which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-22 Maryam Aziz , Jesse Anderton , Emilie Kaufmann , Javed Aslam

We propose a novel variant of the UCB algorithm (referred to as Efficient-UCB-Variance (EUCBV)) for minimizing cumulative regret in the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. EUCBV incorporates the arm elimination strategy proposed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-12 Subhojyoti Mukherjee , K. P. Naveen , Nandan Sudarsanam , Balaraman Ravindran

We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit problem called {\em good arm identification} (GAI), where a good arm is defined as an arm with expected reward greater than or equal to a given threshold. GAI is a pure-exploration problem…

We introduce a variant of the classical PAC multi-armed bandit problem. There is an ordered set of $n$ arms $A[1],\dots,A[n]$, each with some stochastic reward drawn from some unknown bounded distribution. The goal is to identify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-11 Albert Cheu , Ravi Sundaram , Jonathan Ullman

Causal knowledge can be used to support decision-making problems. This has been recognized in the causal bandits literature, where a causal (multi-armed) bandit is characterized by a causal graphical model and a target variable. The arms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Francisco N. F. Q. Simoes , Itai Feigenbaum , Mehdi Dastani , Thijs van Ommen

We consider the contextual combinatorial bandit setting where in each round, the learning agent, e.g., a recommender system, selects a subset of "arms," e.g., products, and observes rewards for both the individual base arms, which are a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Baran Atalar , Carlee Joe-Wong

The best arm identification problem (BEST-1-ARM) is the most basic pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits. The problem has a long history and attracted significant attention for the last decade. However, we do not yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-30 Lijie Chen , Jian Li

We present a provably optimal differentially private algorithm for the stochastic multi-arm bandit problem, as opposed to the private analogue of the UCB-algorithm [Mishra and Thakurta, 2015; Tossou and Dimitrakakis, 2016] which doesn't…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-24 Touqir Sajed , Or Sheffet

We propose a generalization of the best arm identification problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) to the setting where every pull of an arm is associated with delayed feedback. The delay in feedback increases the effective sample…

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

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…

The 1-identification problem is a fundamental pure-exploration problem in multi-armed bandits. An agent aims to determine whether there exists an arm whose mean reward exceeds a known threshold $\mu_0$, or to output \textsf{None} otherwise.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung