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Identifying the best arm of a multi-armed bandit is a central problem in bandit optimization. We study a quantum computational version of this problem with coherent oracle access to states encoding the reward probabilities of each arm as…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-02-02 Daochen Wang , Xuchen You , Tongyang Li , Andrew M. Childs

We study the recovering bandits problem, a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where the expected reward of each arm varies according to some unknown function of the time since the arm was last played. While being a natural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-01 Ciara Pike-Burke , Steffen Grünewälder

In this paper, we propose a Thompson Sampling algorithm for \emph{unimodal} bandits, where the expected reward is unimodal over the partially ordered arms. To exploit the unimodal structure better, at each step, instead of exploration from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Long Yang , Zhao Li , Zehong Hu , Shasha Ruan , Shijian Li , Gang Pan , Hongyang Chen

In the Best-$K$ identification problem (Best-$K$-Arm), we are given $N$ stochastic bandit arms with unknown reward distributions. Our goal is to identify the $K$ arms with the largest means with high confidence, by drawing samples from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-22 Haotian Jiang , Jian Li , Mingda Qiao

In many real-world applications, multiple agents seek to learn how to perform highly related yet slightly different tasks in an online bandit learning protocol. We formulate this problem as the $\epsilon$-multi-player multi-armed bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Zhi Wang , Chicheng Zhang , Manish Kumar Singh , Laurel D. Riek , Kamalika Chaudhuri

We study best arm identification in a federated multi-armed bandit setting with a central server and multiple clients, when each client has access to a {\em subset} of arms and each arm yields independent Gaussian observations. The goal is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Zhirui Chen , P. N. Karthik , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Yeow Meng Chee

We consider the best arm identification (BAI) problem in the $K-$armed bandit framework with a modification - the agent is allowed to play a subset of arms at each time slot instead of one arm. Consequently, the agent observes the sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Siddhartha Parupudi , Gourab Ghatak

We consider minimisation of dynamic regret in non-stationary bandits with a slowly varying property. Namely, we assume that arms' rewards are stochastic and independent over time, but that the absolute difference between the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Ramakrishnan Krishnamurthy , Aditya Gopalan

In multi-armed bandits, the most-explored arms are the most informative, while reward maximization typically pulls only the best arm. We study the tradeoff between identifying arm means accurately and accumulating reward, and present an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Akram Erraqabi , Alessandro Lazaric , Michal Valko , Emma Brunskill , Yun-En Liu

Motivated by modern applications, such as online advertisement and recommender systems, we study the top-$k$ extreme contextual bandits problem, where the total number of arms can be enormous, and the learner is allowed to select $k$ arms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-17 Rajat Sen , Alexander Rakhlin , Lexing Ying , Rahul Kidambi , Dean Foster , Daniel Hill , Inderjit Dhillon

We study \emph{multi-armed bandits} (MABs) augmented with \emph{best-action queries}, in which the learner may additionally query an oracle that reveals the best arm in the current round. This setting was recently characterized by Russo et…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Francesco Bacchiocchi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Francesco Emanuele Stradi

We consider the decentralized exploration problem: a set of players collaborate to identify the best arm by asynchronously interacting with the same stochastic environment. The objective is to insure privacy in the best arm identification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Raphaël Féraud , Réda Alami , Romain Laroche

We investigate the Multi-Armed Bandit problem with Temporally-Partitioned Rewards (TP-MAB) setting in this paper. In the TP-MAB setting, an agent will receive subsets of the reward over multiple rounds rather than the entire reward for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Ronald C. van den Broek , Rik Litjens , Tobias Sagis , Luc Siecker , Nina Verbeeke , Pratik Gajane

In this paper, we study the problem of outlier arm detection in multi-armed bandit settings, which finds plenty of applications in many high-impact domains such as finance, healthcare, and online advertising. For this problem, a learner…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Yikun Ban , Jingrui He

While classical formulations of multi-armed bandit problems assume that each arm's reward is independent and stationary, real-world applications often involve non-stationary environments and interdependencies between arms. In particular,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Ryoma Sato , Shinji Ito

This paper studies the problem of identifying any $k$ distinct arms among the top $\rho$ fraction (e.g., top 5\%) of arms from a finite or infinite set with a probably approximately correct (PAC) tolerance $\epsilon$. We consider two cases:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Wenbo Ren , Jia Liu , Ness Shroff

We define a general framework for a large class of combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problems, where subsets of base arms with unknown distributions form super arms. In each round, a super arm is played and the base arms contained in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-30 Wei Chen , Yajun Wang , Yang Yuan , Qinshi Wang

We study exploration in Multi-Armed Bandits in a setting where $k$ players collaborate in order to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal arm. Our motivation comes from recent employment of bandit algorithms in computationally intensive,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-11-05 Eshcar Hillel , Zohar Karnin , Tomer Koren , Ronny Lempel , Oren Somekh

In algorithm optimization in reinforcement learning, how to deal with the exploration-exploitation dilemma is particularly important. Multi-armed bandit problem can optimize the proposed solutions by changing the reward distribution to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-28 Zhendong Shi , Ercan E. Kuruoglu , Xiaoli Wei

We consider a bandit problem where at any time, the decision maker can add new arms to her consideration set. A new arm is queried at a cost from an "arm-reservoir" containing finitely many "arm-types," each characterized by a distinct mean…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-10 Anand Kalvit , Assaf Zeevi