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Most bandit algorithm designs are purely theoretical. Therefore, they have strong regret guarantees, but also are often too conservative in practice. In this work, we pioneer the idea of algorithm design by minimizing the empirical Bayes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-12 Chih-Wei Hsu , Branislav Kveton , Ofer Meshi , Martin Mladenov , Csaba Szepesvari

We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem when one knows the value $\mu^{(\star)}$ of an optimal arm, as a well as a positive lower bound on the smallest positive gap $\Delta$. We propose a new randomized policy that attains a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-02-13 Sébastien Bubeck , Vianney Perchet , Philippe Rigollet

We develop a novel and generic algorithm for the adversarial multi-armed bandit problem (or more generally the combinatorial semi-bandit problem). When instantiated differently, our algorithm achieves various new data-dependent regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Chen-Yu Wei , Haipeng Luo

We introduce a novel extension of the canonical multi-armed bandit problem that incorporates an additional strategic innovation: abstention. In this enhanced framework, the agent is not only tasked with selecting an arm at each time step,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Junwen Yang , Tianyuan Jin , Vincent Y. F. Tan

We study how the regret guarantees of nonstochastic multi-armed bandits can be improved, if the effective range of the losses in each round is small (e.g. the maximal difference between two losses in a given round). Despite a recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-03 Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Ohad Shamir

Simple regret is a natural and parameter-free performance criterion for pure exploration in multi-armed bandits yet is less popular than the probability of missing the best arm or an $\epsilon$-good arm, perhaps due to lack of easy ways to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Yao Zhao , Connor James Stephens , Csaba Szepesvári , Kwang-Sung Jun

We study finite-armed semiparametric bandits, where each arm's reward combines a linear component with an unknown, potentially adversarial shift. This model strictly generalizes classical linear bandits and reflects complexities common in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-18 Seok-Jin Kim , Gi-Soo Kim , Min-hwan Oh

In this paper, we propose a constant word (RAM model) algorithm for regret minimisation for both finite and infinite Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) instances. Most of the existing regret minimisation algorithms need to remember the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-25 Arghya Roy Chaudhuri , Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan

We study the stochastic linear bandit problem with multiple arms over $T$ rounds, where the covariate dimension $d$ may exceed $T$, but each arm-specific parameter vector is $s$-sparse. We begin by analyzing the sequential estimation…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-05-26 Jingyu Liu , Yanglei Song

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem motivated by ``large'' action spaces, and endowed with a population of arms containing exactly $K$ arm-types, each characterized by a distinct mean reward. The decision maker is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-19 Anand Kalvit , Assaf Zeevi

We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed confidence in stochastic linear bandits. The objective is to identify the best arm with a given level of certainty while minimizing the sampling budget. We devise a simple algorithm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-30 Yassir Jedra , Alexandre Proutiere

We study the problem of selecting $K$ arms with the highest expected rewards in a stochastic $n$-armed bandit game. This problem has a wide range of applications, e.g., A/B testing, crowdsourcing, simulation optimization. Our goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Jiecao Chen , Xi Chen , Qin Zhang , Yuan Zhou

This study investigates an asymptotically minimax optimal algorithm in the two-armed fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) problem. Given two treatment arms, the objective is to identify the arm with the highest expected outcome…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-23 Masahiro Kato

The multi-armed bandit problem is a popular model for studying exploration/exploitation trade-off in sequential decision problems. Many algorithms are now available for this well-studied problem. One of the earliest algorithms, given by W.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-04-10 Shipra Agrawal , Navin Goyal

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

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 bandit best-arm identification, an algorithm is tasked with finding the arm with highest mean reward with a specified accuracy as fast as possible. We study multi-fidelity best-arm identification, in which the algorithm can choose to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Riccardo Poiani , Rémy Degenne , Emilie Kaufmann , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

In this paper, we consider a best action identification problem in the stochastic linear bandit setup with a fixed confident constraint. In the considered best action identification problem, instead of minimizing the accumulative regret as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-04 Jun Geng , Lifeng Lai

We discuss a multiple-play multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in which several arms are selected at each round. Recently, Thompson sampling (TS), a randomized algorithm with a Bayesian spirit, has attracted much attention for its empirically…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-22 Junpei Komiyama , Junya Honda , Hiroshi Nakagawa

We study best-arm identification (BAI) in the fixed-budget setting. Adaptive allocations based on upper confidence bounds (UCBs), such as UCBE, are known to work well in BAI. However, it is well-known that its optimal regret is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Rong J. B. Zhu , Yanqi Qiu