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We study the problem of the identification of m arms with largest means under a fixed error rate $\delta$ (fixed-confidence Top-m identification), for misspecified linear bandit models. This problem is motivated by practical applications,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Clémence Réda , Andrea Tirinzoni , Rémy Degenne

Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) formulations usually make certain assumptions about the underlying arms' distributions, such as bounds on the support or their tail behaviour. Moreover, such parametric information is usually 'baked'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Anmol Kagrecha , Jayakrishnan Nair , Krishna Jagannathan

We investigate the sample-memory-pass trade-offs for pure exploration in multi-pass streaming multi-armed bandits (MABs) with the *a priori* knowledge of the optimality gap $\Delta_{[2]}$. Here, and throughout, the optimality gap…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Nikolai Karpov , Chen Wang

We consider the problem of identifying the best arm in stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs) using a fixed sampling budget. Characterizing the minimal instance-specific error probability for this problem constitutes one of the important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Po-An Wang , Ruo-Chun Tzeng , Alexandre Proutiere

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 address the problem of finding the maximizer of a nonlinear smooth function, that can only be evaluated point-wise, subject to constraints on the number of permitted function evaluations. This problem is also known as fixed-budget best…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-11-12 Matthew W. Hoffman , Bobak Shahriari , Nando de Freitas

This paper studies the problem of identifying any $k$ distinct arms among the top $\rho$ fraction (e.g., top 5\%) of arms from a finite or infinite set with a probably approximately correct (PAC) tolerance $\epsilon$. We consider two cases:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Wenbo Ren , Jia Liu , Ness Shroff

We study the Stochastic Multi-armed Bandit problem under bounded arm-memory. In this setting, the arms arrive in a stream, and the number of arms that can be stored in the memory at any time, is bounded. The decision-maker can only pull…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-10 Arnab Maiti , Vishakha Patil , Arindam Khan

We consider best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit problem. Assuming certain continuity conditions of the prior, we characterize the rate of the Bayesian simple regret. Differing from Bayesian regret minimization (Lai, 1987), the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Junpei Komiyama , Kaito Ariu , Masahiro Kato , Chao Qin

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

We lay the foundations of a non-parametric theory of best-arm identification in multi-armed bandits with a fixed budget T. We consider general, possibly non-parametric, models D for distributions over the arms; an overarching example is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Antoine Barrier , Aurélien Garivier , Gilles Stoltz

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

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

We present a provably optimal differentially private algorithm for the stochastic multi-arm bandit problem, as opposed to the private analogue of the UCB-algorithm [Mishra and Thakurta, 2015; Tossou and Dimitrakakis, 2016] which doesn't…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-24 Touqir Sajed , Or Sheffet

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

Identifying the best arm of a multi-armed bandit is a central problem in bandit optimization. We study a quantum computational version of this problem with coherent oracle access to states encoding the reward probabilities of each arm as…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-02-02 Daochen Wang , Xuchen You , Tongyang Li , Andrew M. Childs

We consider the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits, which focuses purely on exploration. A player is given a fixed budget to explore a finite set of arms, and the rewards of each arm are drawn independently from a fixed,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-08-02 Shahin Shahrampour , Mohammad Noshad , Vahid Tarokh

We design and analyze VA-LUCB, a parameter-free algorithm, for identifying the best arm under the fixed-confidence setup and under a stringent constraint that the variance of the chosen arm is strictly smaller than a given threshold. An…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Yunlong Hou , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Zixin Zhong

Good arm identification (GAI) is a pure-exploration bandit problem in which a single learner outputs an arm as soon as it is identified as a good arm. A good arm is defined as an arm with an expected reward greater than or equal to a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Tzu-Hsien Tsai , Yun-Da Tsai , Shou-De Lin

For the model of constrained multi-armed bandit, we show that by construction there exists an index-based deterministic asymptotically optimal algorithm. The optimality is achieved by the convergence of the probability of choosing an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-30 Hyeong Soo Chang