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Related papers: Asymptotically Optimal Fixed-Budget Best Arm Ident…

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This paper considers a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem with dual objectives: (i) quick identification and commitment to the optimal arm, and (ii) reward maximization throughout a sequence of $T$ consecutive rounds. Though each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

We consider the problem of identifying the best arm in stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs) using a fixed sampling budget. Characterizing the minimal instance-specific error probability for this problem constitutes one of the important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Po-An Wang , Ruo-Chun Tzeng , Alexandre Proutiere

We introduce Box Thirding (B3), a flexible and efficient algorithm for Best Arm Identification (BAI) under fixed-budget constraints. It is designed for both anytime BAI and scenarios with large N, where the number of arms is too large for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-23 Seohwa Hwang , Junyong Park

We study fixed-confidence Best Arm Identification (BAI) in semiparametric bandits, where rewards are linear in arm features plus an unknown additive baseline shift. Unlike linear-bandit BAI, this setting requires orthogonalized regression,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-07 Seok-Jin Kim

We study the fixed-confidence best-arm identification problem in unimodal bandits, in which the means of the arms increase with the index of the arm up to their maximum, then decrease. We derive two lower bounds on the stopping time of any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Riccardo Poiani , Marc Jourdan , Emilie Kaufmann , Rémy Degenne

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 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 this paper, we study a best arm identification problem with dual objects. In addition to the classic reward, each arm is associated with a cost distribution and the goal is to identify the largest reward arm using the minimum expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Kellen Kanarios , Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

We study the batched best arm identification (BBAI) problem, where the learner's goal is to identify the best arm while switching the policy as less as possible. In particular, we aim to find the best arm with probability $1-\delta$ for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Tianyuan Jin , Yu Yang , Jing Tang , Xiaokui Xiao , Pan Xu

This study investigates an asymptotically locally minimax optimal algorithm for fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI). We propose the Generalized Neyman Allocation (GNA) algorithm and demonstrate that its worst-case upper bound on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Masahiro Kato

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 best-arm identification with fixed confidence in bandit models with graph smoothness constraint. We provide and analyze an efficient gradient ascent algorithm to compute the sample complexity of this problem as a solution of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-21 Tomáš Kocák , Aurélien Garivier

We consider a stochastic bandit problem with infinitely many arms. In this setting, the learner has no chance of trying all the arms even once and has to dedicate its limited number of samples only to a certain number of arms. All previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-05-19 Alexandra Carpentier , Michal Valko

In this paper, we introduce the constrained best mixed arm identification (CBMAI) problem with a fixed budget. This is a pure exploration problem in a stochastic finite armed bandit model. Each arm is associated with a reward and multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Dengwang Tang , Rahul Jain , Ashutosh Nayyar , Pierluigi Nuzzo

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

We study best arm identification in a restless multi-armed bandit setting with finitely many arms. The discrete-time data generated by each arm forms a homogeneous Markov chain taking values in a common, finite state space. The state…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-25 P. N. Karthik , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Arpan Mukherjee , Ali Tajer

We study a regret minimization problem with the existence of multiple best/near-optimal arms in the multi-armed bandit setting. We consider the case when the number of arms/actions is comparable or much larger than the time horizon, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-23 Yinglun Zhu , Robert Nowak

Motivated by the task of hyperparameter optimization, we introduce the non-stochastic best-arm identification problem. Within the multi-armed bandit literature, the cumulative regret objective enjoys algorithms and analyses for both the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-02 Kevin Jamieson , Ameet Talwalkar

This paper presents a comprehensive study on the problem of Best Arm Retention (BAR), which has recently found applications in streaming algorithms for multi-armed bandits. In the BAR problem, the goal is to retain $m$ arms with the best…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Houshuang Chen , Yuchen He , Chihao Zhang

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