English
Related papers

Related papers: Improving the Knowledge Gradient Algorithm

200 papers

This paper investigates the problem of best arm identification in $\textit{contaminated}$ stochastic multi-arm bandits. In this setting, the rewards obtained from any arm are replaced by samples from an adversarial model with probability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Arpan Mukherjee , Ali Tajer , Pin-Yu Chen , Payel Das

The knowledge gradient is a popular acquisition function in Bayesian optimization (BO) for optimizing black-box objectives with noisy function evaluations. Many practical settings, however, allow only pairwise comparison queries, yielding a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Kaiwen Wu , Jacob R. Gardner

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

We propose a new strategy for best-arm identification with fixed confidence of Gaussian variables with bounded means and unit variance. This strategy, called Exploration-Biased Sampling, is not only asymptotically optimal: it is to the best…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-08 Antoine Barrier , Aurélien Garivier , Tomáš Kocák

We consider the fixed-confidence best arm identification (FC-BAI) problem in the Bayesian setting. This problem aims to find the arm of the largest mean with a fixed confidence level when the bandit model has been sampled from the known…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-25 Kyoungseok Jang , Junpei Komiyama , Kazutoshi Yamazaki

In multi-armed bandits, the tasks of reward maximization and pure exploration are often at odds with each other. The former focuses on exploiting arms with the highest means, while the latter may require constant exploration across all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Brian Cho , Dominik Meier , Kyra Gan , Nathan Kallus

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

This paper considers the optimal adaptive allocation of measurement effort for identifying the best among a finite set of options or designs. An experimenter sequentially chooses designs to measure and observes noisy signals of their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-11 Daniel Russo

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

We consider the quantum version of the bandit problem known as {\em best arm identification} (BAI). We first propose a quantum modeling of the BAI problem, which assumes that both the learning agent and the environment are quantum; we then…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Balthazar Casalé , Giuseppe Di Molfetta , Hachem Kadri , Liva Ralaivola

We study best arm identification (BAI) in linear bandits in the fixed-budget regime under differential privacy constraints, when the arm rewards are supported on the unit interval. Given a finite budget $T$ and a privacy parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Zhirui Chen , P. N. Karthik , Yeow Meng Chee , Vincent Y. F. Tan

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

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 sequentially making decisions that are rewarded by "successes" and "failures" which can be predicted through an unknown relationship that depends on a partially controllable vector of attributes for each instance.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-18 Yingfei Wang , Chu Wang , Warren Powell

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

Knowledge graph (KG) plays an increasingly important role to improve the recommendation performance and interpretability. A recent technical trend is to design end-to-end models based on information propagation schemes. However, existing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Yuntao Du , Xinjun Zhu , Lu Chen , Baihua Zheng , Yunjun Gao

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

This paper investigates the best arm identification (BAI) problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits in the fixed confidence setting. The general class of the exponential family of bandits is considered. The existing algorithms for the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-26 Arpan Mukherjee , Ali Tajer

Bayesian optimization has been successful at global optimization of expensive-to-evaluate multimodal objective functions. However, unlike most optimization methods, Bayesian optimization typically does not use derivative information. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-08 Jian Wu , Matthias Poloczek , Andrew Gordon Wilson , Peter I. Frazier

We present a new algorithm based on an gradient ascent for a general Active Exploration bandit problem in the fixed confidence setting. This problem encompasses several well studied problems such that the Best Arm Identification or…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-21 Pierre Ménard