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We give a new algorithm for best arm identification in linearly parameterised bandits in the fixed confidence setting. The algorithm generalises the well-known LUCB algorithm of Kalyanakrishnan et al. (2012) by playing an arm which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-11 Mohammadi Zaki , Avinash Mohan , Aditya Gopalan

We consider the Max $K$-Armed Bandit problem, where a learning agent is faced with several sources (arms) of items (rewards), and interested in finding the best item overall. At each time step the agent chooses an arm, and obtains a random…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-08-25 Yahel David , Nahum Shimkin

We consider the problem of best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit model, under fixed confidence. Given a confidence input $\delta$, the goal is to identify the arm with the highest mean reward with a probability of at least 1 --…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-21 El Mehdi Saad , Gilles Blanchard , Nicolas Verzelen

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

We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a multi-armed bandit environment when each arm is a time-homogeneous and ergodic discrete-time Markov process on a common, finite state space. The state evolution on each arm is governed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-30 P. N. Karthik , Kota Srinivas Reddy , Vincent Y. F. Tan

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 introduce the model selection problem in pure exploration linear bandits, where the learner needs to adapt to the instance-dependent complexity measure of the smallest hypothesis class containing the true model. We design algorithms in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-18 Yinglun Zhu , Julian Katz-Samuels , Robert Nowak

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 fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) problem in non-stationary linear bandits. Concretely, given a fixed time budget $T\in \mathbb{N}$, finite arm set $\mathcal{X} \subset \mathbb{R}^d$, and a potentially adversarial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-12 Leo Maynard-Zhang , Zhihan Xiong , Kevin Jamieson , Maryam Fazel

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

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

The challenge of identifying the best feasible arm within a fixed budget has attracted considerable interest in recent years. However, a notable gap remains in the literature: the exact exponential rate at which the error probability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Jie Bian , Vincent Y. F. Tan

We consider a stochastic bandit problem with a possibly infinite number of arms. We write $p^*$ for the proportion of optimal arms and $\Delta$ for the minimal mean-gap between optimal and sub-optimal arms. We characterize the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Rianne de Heide , James Cheshire , Pierre Ménard , Alexandra Carpentier

We consider a variant of the best arm identification task in stochastic multi-armed bandits. Motivated by risk-averse decision-making problems, our goal is to identify a set of $m$ arms with the highest $\tau$-quantile values within a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Mengyan Zhang , Cheng Soon Ong

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 preference-based pure exploration problem for bandits with vector-valued rewards. The rewards are ordered using a (given) preference cone $\mathcal{C}$ and our goal is to identify the set of Pareto optimal arms. First, to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-20 Apurv Shukla , Debabrota Basu

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

Sequential decision making under uncertainty is studied in a mixed observability domain. The goal is to maximize the amount of information obtained on a partially observable stochastic process under constraints imposed by a fully observable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-03-16 Mikko Lauri , Risto Ritala

We study a novel multi-armed bandit problem that models the challenge faced by a company wishing to explore new strategies to maximize revenue whilst simultaneously maintaining their revenue above a fixed baseline, uniformly over time.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-02-16 Yifan Wu , Roshan Shariff , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvári

In this paper we consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for uncontrolled restless bandit problems. In an uncontrolled restless bandit problem, there is a finite set of arms, each of which when pulled yields a positive reward.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-01-30 Cem Tekin , Mingyan Liu