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We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-13 Alexander Luedtke , Emilie Kaufmann , Antoine Chambaz

The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Avrim Blum , Marten Garicano , Kavya Ravichandran , Dravyansh Sharma

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Adrienne Tuynman , Rémy Degenne

This paper studies regret minimization in a multi-armed bandit. It is well known that side information, such as the prior distribution of arm means in Thompson sampling, can improve the statistical efficiency of the bandit algorithm. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Rong Zhu , Branislav Kveton

Many real-world functions are defined over both categorical and category-specific continuous variables and thus cannot be optimized by traditional Bayesian optimization (BO) methods. To optimize such functions, we propose a new method that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Dang Nguyen , Sunil Gupta , Santu Rana , Alistair Shilton , Svetha Venkatesh

We introduce a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, in which bandits are streamed one at a time to the player, and at each point, the player can either choose to pull the current bandit or move on to the next bandit. Once a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-07-18 Uma Roy , Ashwath Thirmulai , Joe Zurier

Combinatorial bandits with semi-bandit feedback generalize multi-armed bandits, where the agent chooses sets of arms and observes a noisy reward for each arm contained in the chosen set. The action set satisfies a given structure such as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-22 Marc Jourdan , Mojmír Mutný , Johannes Kirschner , Andreas Krause

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 the Improving Multi-Armed Bandit (IMAB) problem, where the reward obtained from an arm increases with the number of pulls it receives. This model provides an elegant abstraction for many real-world problems in domains such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-22 Vishakha Patil , Vineet Nair , Ganesh Ghalme , Arindam Khan

We consider a non-stationary formulation of the stochastic multi-armed bandit where the rewards are no longer assumed to be identically distributed. For the best-arm identification task, we introduce a version of Successive Elimination…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-09-09 Robin Allesiardo , Raphaël Féraud , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

We consider the question introduced by \cite{Mason2020} of identifying all the $\varepsilon$-optimal arms in a finite stochastic multi-armed bandit with Gaussian rewards. We give two lower bounds on the sample complexity of any algorithm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-07 Aymen Al Marjani , Tomáš Kocák , Aurélien Garivier

We study stochastic linear optimization problem with bandit feedback. The set of arms take values in an $N$-dimensional space and belong to a bounded polyhedron described by finitely many linear inequalities. We provide a lower bound for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-29 Manjesh K. Hanawal , Amir Leshem , Venkatesh Saligrama

We present a new type of acquisition functions for online decision making in multi-armed and contextual bandit problems with extreme payoffs. Specifically, we model the payoff function as a Gaussian process and formulate a novel type of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Yibo Yang , Antoine Blanchard , Themistoklis Sapsis , Paris Perdikaris

In this paper, we study a slate bandit problem where the function that determines the slate-level reward is non-separable: the optimal value of the function cannot be determined by learning the optimal action for each slot. We are mainly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-04-22 Jason Rhuggenaath , Alp Akcay , Yingqian Zhang , Uzay Kaymak

We consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with complex actions over a set of basic arms, where the decision maker plays a complex action rather than a basic arm in each round. The reward of the complex action is some function of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-11-05 Aditya Gopalan , Shie Mannor , Yishay Mansour

We study finite-armed stochastic bandits where the rewards of each arm might be correlated to those of other arms. We introduce a novel phased algorithm that exploits the given structure to build confidence sets over the parameters of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Andrea Tirinzoni , Alessandro Lazaric , Marcello Restelli

We lay the foundations of a non-parametric theory of best-arm identification in multi-armed bandits with a fixed budget T. We consider general, possibly non-parametric, models D for distributions over the arms; an overarching example is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Antoine Barrier , Aurélien Garivier , Gilles Stoltz

In this paper, we study the pure exploration bandit model on general distribution functions, which means that the reward function of each arm depends on the whole distribution, not only its mean. We adapt the racing framework and LUCB…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Siwei Wang , Wei Chen

In order to distribute the best arm identification task as close as possible to the user's devices, on the edge of the Radio Access Network, we propose a new problem setting, where distributed players collaborate to find the best arm. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-03-30 Raphaël Féraud

We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-17 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Peter L. Bartlett , Victor Gabillon , Alan Malek , Michal Valko