English
Related papers

Related papers: Cost Aware Best Arm Identification

200 papers

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 fixed-confidence best arm identification in generalized linear bandits under a hybrid feedback model: at each round, the learner may query either (i) absolute reward feedback from a single arm or (ii) relative (dueling) feedback…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Qirun Zeng , Xuchuang Wang , Jiayi Shen , Xutong Liu , Fang Kong , Jinhang Zuo

Machine learning has been making great success in many application areas. However, for the non-expert practitioners, it is always very challenging to address a machine learning task successfully and efficiently. Finding the optimal machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Guanghui Zhu , Xin Fang , Feng Cheng , Lei Wang , Wenzhong Chen , Chunfeng Yuan , Yihua Huang

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

We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Soumya Basu , Rajat Sen , Sujay Sanghavi , Sanjay Shakkottai

We present an algorithm, "constrained successive accept or reject (CSAR)," for the problem of identifying the subset of top feasible-arms from a given finite set of arms with the limited sampling-budget equal to a given time-horizon when…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-22 Hyeong Soo Chang

Recently multi-armed bandit problem arises in many real-life scenarios where arms must be sampled in batches, due to limited time the agent can wait for the feedback. Such applications include biological experimentation and online…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-22 Shengyu Cao , Simai He , Ruoqing Jiang , Jin Xu , Hongsong Yuan

A matching platform is a system that matches different types of participants, such as companies and job-seekers. In such a platform, merely maximizing the number of matches can result in matches being concentrated on highly popular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Yuki Shibukawa , Koichi Tanaka , Yuta Saito , Shinji Ito

One of the key drivers of complexity in the classical (stochastic) multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is the difference between mean rewards in the top two arms, also known as the instance gap. The celebrated Upper Confidence Bound (UCB)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Anand Kalvit , Assaf Zeevi

We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-13 Alexander Luedtke , Emilie Kaufmann , Antoine Chambaz

Online platforms in the Internet Economy commonly incorporate recommender systems that recommend products (or "arms") to users (or "agents"). A key challenge in this domain arises from myopic agents who are naturally incentivized to exploit…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Xiaowu Dai , Wenlu Xu , Yuan Qi , Michael I. Jordan

This paper studies active learning in the context of robust statistics. Specifically, we propose a variant of the Best Arm Identification problem for \emph{contaminated bandits}, where each arm pull has probability $\varepsilon$ of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-16 Jason Altschuler , Victor-Emmanuel Brunel , Alan Malek

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classic example of the exploration-exploitation dilemma. It is concerned with maximising the total rewards for a gambler by sequentially pulling an arm from a multi-armed slot machine where each arm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-16 Xue Lu , Niall Adams , Nikolas Kantas

In the infinite-armed bandit problem, each arm's average reward is sampled from an unknown distribution, and each arm can be sampled further to obtain noisy estimates of the average reward of that arm. Prior work focuses on identifying the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Yifei Wang , Tavor Baharav , Yanjun Han , Jiantao Jiao , David Tse

We consider the best-k-arm identification problem for multi-armed bandits, where the objective is to select the exact set of k arms with the highest mean rewards by sequentially allocating measurement effort. We characterize the necessary…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Wei You , Chao Qin , Zihao Wang , Shuoguang Yang

This paper presents a comprehensive study on the problem of Best Arm Retention (BAR), which has recently found applications in streaming algorithms for multi-armed bandits. In the BAR problem, the goal is to retain $m$ arms with the best…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Houshuang Chen , Yuchen He , Chihao Zhang

This paper introduces the informational multi-armed bandit (IMAB) model in which at each round, a player chooses an arm, observes a symbol, and receives an unobserved reward in the form of the symbol's self-information. Thus, the expected…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-09-07 Nir Weinberger , Michal Yemini

This paper introduces a general multi-agent bandit model in which each agent is facing a finite set of arms and may communicate with other agents through a central controller in order to identify, in pure exploration, or play, in regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-31 Clémence Réda , Sattar Vakili , Emilie Kaufmann

We investigate the sample complexity of learning the optimal arm for multi-task bandit problems. Arms consist of two components: one that is shared across tasks (that we call representation) and one that is task-specific (that we call…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-29 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

We address the problem of identifying the optimal policy with a fixed confidence level in a multi-armed bandit setup, when \emph{the arms are subject to linear constraints}. Unlike the standard best-arm identification problem which is well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Emil Carlsson , Debabrota Basu , Fredrik D. Johansson , Devdatt Dubhashi