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Top-$2$ methods have become popular in solving the best arm identification (BAI) problem. The best arm, or the arm with the largest mean amongst finitely many, is identified through an algorithm that at any sequential step independently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Agniv Bandyopadhyay , Sandeep Juneja , Shubhada Agrawal

We consider the problem of identifying any $k$ out of the best $m$ arms in an $n$-armed stochastic multi-armed bandit. Framed in the PAC setting, this particular problem generalises both the problem of `best subset selection' and that of…

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

Many high-stakes decisions in health care, public policy, and clinical development require committing to a single policy that will be applied uniformly across a heterogeneous population. Regulatory and fairness standards sometime requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Tingyu Zhu , Yuhang Wu , Zeyu Zheng

We consider the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits, which focuses purely on exploration. A player is given a fixed budget to explore a finite set of arms, and the rewards of each arm are drawn independently from a fixed,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-08-02 Shahin Shahrampour , Mohammad Noshad , Vahid Tarokh

This study investigates the experimental design problem for identifying the arm with the highest expected outcome, referred to as best arm identification (BAI). In our experiments, the number of treatment-allocation rounds is fixed. During…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-03-12 Masahiro Kato

Good arm identification (GAI) is a pure-exploration bandit problem in which a single learner outputs an arm as soon as it is identified as a good arm. A good arm is defined as an arm with an expected reward greater than or equal to a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Tzu-Hsien Tsai , Yun-Da Tsai , Shou-De Lin

This study investigates minimax and Bayes optimal strategies for fixed-budget best-arm identification. We consider an adaptive procedure consisting of a sampling phase followed by a recommendation phase, and we design an adaptive experiment…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-02-05 Masahiro Kato

Fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) is a bandit problem where the agent maximizes the probability of identifying the optimal arm within a fixed budget of observations. In this work, we study this problem in the Bayesian setting. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Alexia Atsidakou , Sumeet Katariya , Sujay Sanghavi , Branislav Kveton

We study the best-arm identification problem in linear bandit, where the rewards of the arms depend linearly on an unknown parameter $\theta^*$ and the objective is to return the arm with the largest reward. We characterize the complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-11-05 Marta Soare , Alessandro Lazaric , Rémi Munos

The 1-identification problem is a fundamental pure-exploration problem in multi-armed bandits. An agent aims to determine whether there exists an arm whose mean reward exceeds a known threshold $\mu_0$, or to output \textsf{None} otherwise.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

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 propose a novel formulation of group fairness with biased feedback in the contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) setting. In the CMAB setting, a sequential decision maker must, at each time step, choose an arm to pull from a finite set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Candice Schumann , Zhi Lang , Nicholas Mattei , John P. Dickerson

This paper studies two variants of the best arm identification (BAI) problem under the streaming model, where we have a stream of $n$ arms with reward distributions supported on $[0,1]$ with unknown means. The arms in the stream are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Tianyuan Jin , Keke Huang , Jing Tang , Xiaokui Xiao

This paper studies active learning in the context of robust statistics. Specifically, we propose a variant of the Best Arm Identification problem for \emph{contaminated bandits}, where each arm pull has probability $\varepsilon$ of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-16 Jason Altschuler , Victor-Emmanuel Brunel , Alan Malek

This paper investigates the best arm identification (BAI) problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits in the fixed confidence setting. The general class of the exponential family of bandits is considered. The existing algorithms for the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-26 Arpan Mukherjee , Ali Tajer

We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. Given a set of $n$ arms indexed from $1$ to $n$, each arm $i$ is associated with an unknown reward distribution supported on $[0,1]$ with mean…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Pinyan Lu , Chao Tao , Xiaojin Zhang

Motivated by the cost heterogeneity in experimentation across different alternatives, we study the Best Arm Identification with Resource Constraints (BAIwRC) problem. The agent aims to identify the best arm under resource constraints, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

This paper investigates a hitherto unaddressed aspect of best arm identification (BAI) in stochastic multi-armed bandits in the fixed-confidence setting. Two key metrics for assessing bandit algorithms are computational efficiency and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-26 Arpan Mukherjee , Ali Tajer

We study the pure exploration problem subject to a matroid constraint (Best-Basis) in a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. In a Best-Basis instance, we are given $n$ stochastic arms with unknown reward distributions, as well as a matroid…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-26 Lijie Chen , Anupam Gupta , Jian Li

Stochastic multi-armed bandits are a sequential-decision-making framework, where, at each interaction step, the learner selects an arm and observes a stochastic reward. Within the context of best-arm identification (BAI) problems, the goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Riccardo Poiani , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli