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Best-arm identification (BAI) in a fixed-budget setting is a bandit problem where the learning agent maximizes the probability of identifying the optimal (best) arm after a fixed number of observations. Most works on this topic study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Mohammad Javad Azizi , Branislav Kveton , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

In this paper, we introduce the constrained best mixed arm identification (CBMAI) problem with a fixed budget. This is a pure exploration problem in a stochastic finite armed bandit model. Each arm is associated with a reward and multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Dengwang Tang , Rahul Jain , Ashutosh Nayyar , Pierluigi Nuzzo

We consider the problem of best arm identification in a variant of multi-armed bandits called linked bandits. In a single interaction with linked bandits, multiple arms are played sequentially until one of them receives a positive reward.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Anant Gupta

We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Kota Srinivas Reddy , P. N. Karthik , Nikhil Karamchandani , Jayakrishnan Nair

This paper studies the fixed-confidence best arm identification (BAI) problem in the bandit framework in the canonical single-parameter exponential models. For this problem, many policies have been proposed, but most of them require solving…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-12 Jongyeong Lee , Junya Honda , Masashi Sugiyama

We consider a non-stationary formulation of the stochastic multi-armed bandit where the rewards are no longer assumed to be identically distributed. For the best-arm identification task, we introduce a version of Successive Elimination…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-09-09 Robin Allesiardo , Raphaël Féraud , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

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

The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Avrim Blum , Marten Garicano , Kavya Ravichandran , Dravyansh Sharma

We investigate the problem of batched best arm identification in multi-armed bandits, where we aim to identify the best arm from a set of $n$ arms while minimizing both the number of samples and batches. We introduce an algorithm that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Tianyuan Jin , Qin Zhang , Dongruo Zhou

Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret. This innovative variant of the multi-armed bandit problem elegantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-30 Junwen Yang , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Tianyuan Jin

Over the past few years, the multi-armed bandit model has become increasingly popular in the machine learning community, partly because of applications including online content optimization. This paper reviews two different sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Emilie Kaufmann , Aurélien Garivier

In the classical best arm identification (Best-$1$-Arm) problem, we are given $n$ stochastic bandit arms, each associated with a reward distribution with an unknown mean. We would like to identify the arm with the largest mean with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-25 Lijie Chen , Jian Li , Mingda Qiao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Anirban Bhattacharjee , Sushant Vijayan , Sandeep K Juneja

A/B testing, or controlled experiments, is the gold standard approach to causally compare the performance of algorithms on online platforms. However, conventional Bernoulli randomization in A/B testing faces many challenges such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Yongkang Guo , Yuan Yuan , Jinshan Zhang , Yuqing Kong , Zhihua Zhu , Zheng Cai

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 consider stochastic bandit problems with a continuous set of arms and where the expected reward is a continuous and unimodal function of the arm. No further assumption is made regarding the smoothness and the structure of the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-09 Richard Combes , Alexandre Proutiere

We study best-arm identification in stochastic multi-armed bandits under the fixed-confidence setting, focusing on instances with multiple optimal arms. Unlike prior work that addresses the unknown-number-of-optimal-arms case, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Lan V. Truong

In this paper, we consider the problem of multi-armed bandits with a large, possibly infinite number of correlated arms. We assume that the arms have Bernoulli distributed rewards, independent across time, where the probabilities of success…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-11-21 Chong Jiang , R. Srikant

We investigate a Bayesian $k$-armed bandit problem in the \emph{many-armed} regime, where $k \geq \sqrt{T}$ and $T$ represents the time horizon. Initially, and aligned with recent literature on many-armed bandit problems, we observe that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-21 Mohsen Bayati , Nima Hamidi , Ramesh Johari , Khashayar Khosravi

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