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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 the Max $K$-Armed Bandit problem, where a learning agent is faced with several stochastic arms, each a source of i.i.d. rewards of unknown distribution. At each time step the agent chooses an arm, and observes the reward of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-25 Yahel David , Nahum Shimkin

In this paper, we consider a bandit problem in which there are a number of groups each consisting of infinitely many arms. Whenever a new arm is requested from a given group, its mean reward is drawn from an unknown reservoir distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-02 Ivan Lau , Yan Hao Ling , Mayank Shrivastava , Jonathan Scarlett

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 lay the foundations of a non-parametric theory of best-arm identification in multi-armed bandits with a fixed budget T. We consider general, possibly non-parametric, models D for distributions over the arms; an overarching example is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Antoine Barrier , Aurélien Garivier , Gilles Stoltz

In the Best-$k$-Arm problem, we are given $n$ stochastic bandit arms, each associated with an unknown reward distribution. We are required to identify the $k$ arms with the largest means by taking as few samples as possible. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-15 Lijie Chen , Jian Li , Mingda Qiao

We consider the problem of \textit{best arm identification} with a \textit{fixed budget $T$}, in the $K$-armed stochastic bandit setting, with arms distribution defined on $[0,1]$. We prove that any bandit strategy, for at least one bandit…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-05-31 Alexandra Carpentier , Andrea Locatelli

In multi-objective decision-making with hierarchical preferences, lexicographic bandits provide a natural framework for optimizing multiple objectives in a prioritized order. In this setting, a learner repeatedly selects arms and observes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Bo Xue , Yuanyu Wan , Zhichao Lu , Qingfu Zhang

In fixed budget bandit identification, an algorithm sequentially observes samples from several distributions up to a given final time. It then answers a query about the set of distributions. A good algorithm will have a small probability of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-03 Rémy Degenne

Motivated by a natural problem in online model selection with bandit information, we introduce and analyze a best arm identification problem in the rested bandit setting, wherein arm expected losses decrease with the number of times the arm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-08 Leonardo Cella , Claudio Gentile , Massimiliano Pontil

The best arm identification problem (BEST-1-ARM) is the most basic pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits. The problem has a long history and attracted significant attention for the last decade. However, we do not yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-30 Lijie Chen , Jian Li

We consider a variant of the best arm identification (BAI) problem in multi-armed bandits (MAB) in which there are two sets of arms (source and target), and the objective is to determine the best target arm while only pulling source arms.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Ojash Neopane , Aaditya Ramdas , Aarti Singh

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

We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-17 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Peter L. Bartlett , Victor Gabillon , Alan Malek , Michal Valko

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-02 Zhekai Li , Tianyi Ma , Cheng Hua , Ruihao Zhu

This paper introduces a general multi-agent bandit model in which each agent is facing a finite set of arms and may communicate with other agents through a central controller in order to identify, in pure exploration, or play, in regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-31 Clémence Réda , Sattar Vakili , Emilie Kaufmann

Motivated by recursive learning in Markov Decision Processes, this paper studies best-arm identification in bandit problems where each arm's reward is drawn from a multinomial distribution with a known support. We compare the performance {…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Mehrasa Ahmadipour , élise Crepon , Aurélien Garivier

We introduce a new graphical bilinear bandit problem where a learner (or a \emph{central entity}) allocates arms to the nodes of a graph and observes for each edge a noisy bilinear reward representing the interaction between the two end…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Geovani Rizk , Albert Thomas , Igor Colin , Rida Laraki , Yann Chevaleyre

In this paper we consider the problem of best-arm identification in multi-armed bandits in the fixed confidence setting, where the goal is to identify, with probability $1-\delta$ for some $\delta>0$, the arm with the highest mean reward in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-13 Samarth Gupta , Gauri Joshi , Osman Yağan

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