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We study a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting where arms are partitioned into known clusters, such that the mean rewards of arms within a cluster differ by at most a known threshold. While the clustering structure is known a priori, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Aakash Gore , Prasanna Chaporkar

In good arm identification (GAI), the goal is to identify one arm whose average performance exceeds a given threshold, referred to as a good arm, if it exists. Few works have studied GAI in the fixed-budget setting when the sampling budget…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-08 Marc Jourdan , Andrée Delahaye-Duriez , Clémence Réda

The knowledge gradient (KG) algorithm is a popular policy for the best arm identification (BAI) problem. It is built on the simple idea of always choosing the measurement that yields the greatest expected one-step improvement in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Yang Le , Gao Siyang , Ho Chin Pang

The best arm identification problem requires identifying the best alternative (i.e., arm) in active experimentation using the smallest number of experiments (i.e., arm pulls), which is crucial for cost-efficient and timely decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Kapilan Balagopalan , Tuan Ngo Nguyen , Yao Zhao , Kwang-Sung Jun

Real-time status updating applications increasingly rely on networks of devices and edge nodes to maintain data freshness, as quantified by the age of information (AoI) metric. Given that edge computing nodes exhibit uncertain and…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Mengqiu Zhou , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Meng Zhang

In this paper, we address the problem of identifying the Pareto Set under feasibility constraints in a multivariate bandit setting. Specifically, given a $K$-armed bandit with unknown means $\mu_1, \dots, \mu_K \in \mathbb{R}^d$, the goal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-11 Cyrille Kone , Emilie Kaufmann , Laura Richert

In the infinite-armed bandit problem, each arm's average reward is sampled from an unknown distribution, and each arm can be sampled further to obtain noisy estimates of the average reward of that arm. Prior work focuses on identifying the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Yifei Wang , Tavor Baharav , Yanjun Han , Jiantao Jiao , David Tse

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

Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) formulations usually make certain assumptions about the underlying arms' distributions, such as bounds on the support or their tail behaviour. Moreover, such parametric information is usually 'baked'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Anmol Kagrecha , Jayakrishnan Nair , Krishna Jagannathan

We study the best-arm identification problem with fixed confidence when contextual (covariate) information is available in stochastic bandits. Although we can use contextual information in each round, we are interested in the marginalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Masahiro Kato , Kaito Ariu

We study the problem of best-arm identification (BAI) in the fixed-budget setting with heterogeneous reward variances. We propose two variance-adaptive BAI algorithms for this setting: SHVar for known reward variances and SHAdaVar for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Anusha Lalitha , Kousha Kalantari , Yifei Ma , Anoop Deoras , Branislav Kveton

We investigate the fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) problem for linear bandits in a potentially non-stationary environment. Given a finite arm set $\mathcal{X}\subset\mathbb{R}^d$, a fixed budget $T$, and an unpredictable sequence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Zhihan Xiong , Romain Camilleri , Maryam Fazel , Lalit Jain , Kevin Jamieson

We study best-arm identification (BAI) in the fixed-budget setting. Adaptive allocations based on upper confidence bounds (UCBs), such as UCBE, are known to work well in BAI. However, it is well-known that its optimal regret is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Rong J. B. Zhu , Yanqi Qiu

In multi-armed bandit problems, the typical goal is to identify the arm with the highest reward. This paper explores a threshold-based bandit problem, aiming to select an arm based on its relation to a prescribed threshold \(\tau \). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Chanakya Varude , Jay Chaudhary , Siddharth Kaushik , Prasanna Chaporkar

We study sequential decision-making with known rewards and unknown constraints, motivated by situations where the constraints represent expensive-to-evaluate human preferences, such as safe and comfortable driving behavior. We formalize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-13 David Lindner , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Katja Hofmann , Andreas Krause

This work considers the problem of selective-sampling for best-arm identification. Given a set of potential options $\mathcal{Z}\subset\mathbb{R}^d$, a learner aims to compute with probability greater than $1-\delta$, $\arg\max_{z\in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Romain Camilleri , Zhihan Xiong , Maryam Fazel , Lalit Jain , Kevin Jamieson

We investigate the problem of fixed-budget best arm identification (BAI) for minimizing expected simple regret. In an adaptive experiment, a decision maker draws one of multiple treatment arms based on past observations and observes the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Masahiro Kato , Masaaki Imaizumi , Takuya Ishihara , Toru Kitagawa

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

This paper considers the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits with semi-bandit feedback and a cardinality constraint on the super-arm size. Existing algorithms for solving this problem typically involve two key sub-routines: (1) a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Arpan Mukherjee , Shashanka Ubaru , Keerthiram Murugesan , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Ali Tajer

Given a vector of probability distributions, or arms, each of which can be sampled independently, we consider the problem of identifying the partition to which this vector belongs from a finitely partitioned universe of such vector of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-06 Sandeep Juneja , Subhashini Krishnasamy