Related papers: Open Problem: Optimal Best Arm Identification with…

We study a grouped bandit setting where each arm comprises multiple independent sub-arms referred to as attributes. Each attribute of each arm has an independent stochastic reward. We impose the constraint that for an arm to be deemed…

Motivated by an open direction in existing literature, we study the 1-identification problem, a fundamental multi-armed bandit formulation on pure exploration. The goal is to determine whether there exists an arm whose mean reward is at…

Pure exploration is one of the fundamental problems in multi-armed bandits (MAB). However, existing works mostly focus on specific pure exploration tasks, without a holistic view of the general pure exploration problem. This work fills this…

We address the problem of finding the maximizer of a nonlinear smooth function, that can only be evaluated point-wise, subject to constraints on the number of permitted function evaluations. This problem is also known as fixed-budget best…

In pure-exploration problems, information is gathered sequentially to answer a question on the stochastic environment. While best-arm identification for linear bandits has been extensively studied in recent years, few works have been…

Berry et al. (1997) initiated the development of the infinite arms bandit problem. They derived a regret lower bound of all allocation strategies for Bernoulli rewards with uniform priors, and proposed strategies based on success runs.…

Best arm identification (or, pure exploration) in multi-armed bandits is a fundamental problem in machine learning. In this paper we study the distributed version of this problem where we have multiple agents, and they want to learn the…

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…

We consider the best arm identification problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit framework where each arm has a tiny probability of realizing large rewards while with overwhelming probability the reward is zero. A key application of…

In fixed-confidence best arm identification (BAI), the objective is to quickly identify the optimal option while controlling the probability of error below a desired threshold. Despite the plethora of BAI algorithms, existing methods…

Active learning methods have shown great promise in reducing the number of samples necessary for learning. As automated learning systems are adopted into real-time, real-world decision-making pipelines, it is increasingly important that…

We study fixed-confidence best arm identification in generalized linear bandits under a hybrid feedback model: at each round, the learner may query either (i) absolute reward feedback from a single arm or (ii) relative (dueling) feedback…

We consider a constrained, pure exploration, stochastic multi-armed bandit formulation under a fixed budget. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution and is described by multiple attributes that are a…

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…

Recently multi-armed bandit problem arises in many real-life scenarios where arms must be sampled in batches, due to limited time the agent can wait for the feedback. Such applications include biological experimentation and online…

We consider the combinatorial bandits problem with semi-bandit feedback under finite sampling budget constraints, in which the learner can carry out its action only for a limited number of times specified by an overall budget. The action is…

We introduce the functional bandit problem, where the objective is to find an arm that optimises a known functional of the unknown arm-reward distributions. These problems arise in many settings such as maximum entropy methods in natural…

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…

Stochastic Rising Bandits (SRBs) model sequential decision-making problems in which the expected reward of the available options increases every time they are selected. This setting captures a wide range of scenarios in which the available…

Motivated by the need to efficiently identify multiple candidates in high trial-and-error cost tasks such as drug discovery, we propose a near-optimal algorithm to identify all {\epsilon}-best arms (i.e., those at most {\epsilon} worse than…