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Related papers: Optimal Batched Best Arm Identification

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In pure-exploration problems, information is gathered sequentially to answer a question on the stochastic environment. While best-arm identification for linear bandits has been extensively studied in recent years, few works have been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-10 Marc Jourdan , Rémy Degenne

We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed budget in stochastic multi-armed bandits with Bernoulli rewards. For the problem with two arms, also known as the A/B testing problem, we prove that there is no algorithm that (i)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-05 Po-An Wang , Kaito Ariu , Alexandre Proutiere

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

We consider the fixed-budget best arm identification problem where the goal is to find the arm of the largest mean with a fixed number of samples. It is known that the probability of misidentifying the best arm is exponentially small to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-28 Junpei Komiyama , Taira Tsuchiya , Junya Honda

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

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 study the problem of Robust Outlier Arm Identification (ROAI), where the goal is to identify arms whose expected rewards deviate substantially from the majority, by adaptively sampling from their reward distributions. We compute the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-22 Yinglun Zhu , Sumeet Katariya , Robert Nowak

The best-arm identification (BAI) problem is one of the most fundamental problems in interactive machine learning, which has two flavors: the fixed-budget setting (FB) and the fixed-confidence setting (FC). For $K$-armed bandits with the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-20 Kapilan Balagopalan , Yinan Li , Yao Zhao , Tuan Nguyen , Anton Daitche , Houssam Nassif , Kwang-Sung Jun

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

Motivated by the cost heterogeneity in experimentation across different alternatives, we study the Best Arm Identification with Resource Constraints (BAIwRC) problem. The agent aims to identify the best arm under resource constraints, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

We present an efficient and generalised procedure to accurately identify the best (or near best) performing algorithm for each sub-task in a multi-problem domain. Our approach treats this as a set of best arm identification problems for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Matthew Stephenson , Alex Newcombe , Eric Piette , Dennis Soemers

The 1-identification problem is a fundamental pure-exploration problem in multi-armed bandits. An agent aims to determine whether there exists an arm whose mean reward exceeds a known threshold $\mu_0$, or to output \textsf{None} otherwise.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

We consider a good arm identification problem in a stochastic bandit setting with multi-objectives, where each arm $i \in [K]$ is associated with a distribution $D_i$ defined over $R^M$. For each round $t$, the player pulls an arm $i_t$ and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Xuanke Jiang , Sherief Hashima , Kohei Hatano , Eiji Takimoto

We study best arm identification in a restless multi-armed bandit setting with finitely many arms. The discrete-time data generated by each arm forms a homogeneous Markov chain taking values in a common, finite state space. The state…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-25 P. N. Karthik , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Arpan Mukherjee , Ali Tajer

We propose a generalization of the best arm identification problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) to the setting where every pull of an arm is associated with delayed feedback. The delay in feedback increases the effective sample…

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

We consider the problem of identifying any $k$ out of the best $m$ arms in an $n$-armed stochastic multi-armed bandit. Framed in the PAC setting, this particular problem generalises both the problem of `best subset selection' and that of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-25 Arghya Roy Chaudhuri , Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan

State of the art online learning procedures focus either on selecting the best alternative ("best arm identification") or on minimizing the cost (the "regret"). We merge these two objectives by providing the theoretical analysis of cost…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-27 Rémy Degenne , Thomas Nedelec , Clément Calauzènes , Vianney Perchet

This paper studies a multi-armed bandit (MAB) version of the range-searching problem. In its basic form, range searching considers as input a set of points (on the real line) and a collection of (real) intervals. Here, with each specified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Siddharth Barman , Ramakrishnan Krishnamurthy , Saladi Rahul

The paper proposes a novel upper confidence bound (UCB) procedure for identifying the arm with the largest mean in a multi-armed bandit game in the fixed confidence setting using a small number of total samples. The procedure cannot be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-12-30 Kevin Jamieson , Matthew Malloy , Robert Nowak , Sébastien Bubeck