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Related papers: An Anytime Algorithm for Good Arm Identification

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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

We consider the best arm identification problem, where the goal is to identify the arm with the highest mean reward from a set of $K$ arms under a limited sampling budget. This problem models many practical scenarios such as A/B testing. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-05 Junpei Komiyama , Kyoungseok Jang , Junya Honda

We study the problem of Bayesian fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) in structured bandits. We propose an algorithm that uses fixed allocations based on the prior information and the structure of the environment. We provide…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-28 Nicolas Nguyen , Imad Aouali , András György , Claire Vernade

This study investigates an asymptotically locally minimax optimal algorithm for fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI). We propose the Generalized Neyman Allocation (GNA) algorithm and demonstrate that its worst-case upper bound on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Masahiro Kato

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

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

The knowledge gradient (KG) algorithm is a popular and effective algorithm for the best arm identification (BAI) problem. Due to the complex calculation of KG, theoretical analysis of this algorithm is difficult, and existing results are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-23 Yanwen Li , Siyang Gao

We study the robust best-arm identification problem (RBAI) in the case of linear rewards. The primary objective is to identify a near-optimal robust arm, which involves selecting arms at every round and assessing their robustness by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Wei Wang , Sattar Vakili , Ilija Bogunovic

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

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

We propose EB-TC$\varepsilon$, a novel sampling rule for $\varepsilon$-best arm identification in stochastic bandits. It is the first instance of Top Two algorithm analyzed for approximate best arm identification. EB-TC$\varepsilon$ is an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-07 Marc Jourdan , Rémy Degenne , Emilie Kaufmann

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 study fixed-confidence best-arm identification (BAI) where a cheap but potentially biased proxy (e.g., LLM judge) is available for every sample, while an expensive ground-truth label can only be acquired selectively when using a human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Ruicheng Ao , Hongyu Chen , Siyang Gao , Hanwei Li , David Simchi-Levi

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

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

In this work, we present a novel framework for Best Arm Identification (BAI) under fairness constraints, a setting that we refer to as \textit{F-BAI} (fair BAI). Unlike traditional BAI, which solely focuses on identifying the optimal arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Alessio Russo , Filippo Vannella

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 study fixed-confidence Best Arm Identification (BAI) in semiparametric bandits, where rewards are linear in arm features plus an unknown additive baseline shift. Unlike linear-bandit BAI, this setting requires orthogonalized regression,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-07 Seok-Jin Kim

We consider the problem of near-optimal arm identification in the fixed confidence setting of the infinitely armed bandit problem when nothing is known about the arm reservoir distribution. We (1) introduce a PAC-like framework within which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-22 Maryam Aziz , Jesse Anderton , Emilie Kaufmann , Javed Aslam

We introduce Box Thirding (B3), a flexible and efficient algorithm for Best Arm Identification (BAI) under fixed-budget constraints. It is designed for both anytime BAI and scenarios with large N, where the number of arms is too large for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-23 Seohwa Hwang , Junyong Park