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We consider a restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) in which there are two types of arms, say A and B. Each arm can be in one of two states, say $0$ or $1.$ Playing a type A arm brings it to state $0$ with probability one and not playing it…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-04-11 Rahul Meshram , Aditya Gopalan , D. Manjunath

Lai and Robbins (1985) and Lai (1987) provided efficient parametric solutions to the multi-armed bandit problem, showing that arm allocation via upper confidence bounds (UCB) achieves minimum regret. These bounds are constructed from the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-01-17 Hock Peng Chan

We study the best arm identification (BAI) problem with potentially biased offline data in the fixed confidence setting, which commonly arises in real-world scenarios such as clinical trials. We prove an impossibility result for adaptive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Le Yang , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Wang Chi Cheung

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 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

We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. Given a set of $n$ arms indexed from $1$ to $n$, each arm $i$ is associated with an unknown reward distribution supported on $[0,1]$ with mean…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Pinyan Lu , Chao Tao , Xiaojin Zhang

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

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is an active learning framework that aims to select the best among a set of actions by sequentially observing rewards. Recently, it has become popular for a number of applications over wireless networks,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-12 Osama A. Hanna , Lin F. Yang , Christina Fragouli

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

In good arm identification (GAI), the goal is to identify one arm whose average performance exceeds a given threshold, referred to as a good arm, if it exists. Few works have studied GAI in the fixed-budget setting when the sampling budget…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-08 Marc Jourdan , Andrée Delahaye-Duriez , Clémence Réda

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

The batched multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, in which rewards are collected in batches, is crucial for applications such as clinical trials. Existing research predominantly assumes light-tailed reward distributions, yet many real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yunwen Guo , Yunlun Shu , Gongyi Zhuo , Tianyu Wang

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and study the problem of constrained regret minimization over a given time horizon. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution, and the merit of an arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Anmol Kagrecha , Jayakrishnan Nair , Krishna Jagannathan

We propose a multi-agent multi-armed bandit (MA-MAB) framework aimed at ensuring fair outcomes across agents while maximizing overall system performance. A key challenge in this setting is decision-making under limited information about arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Tianyi Xu , Jiaxin Liu , Nicholas Mattei , Zizhan Zheng

In this paper, we study a best arm identification problem with dual objects. In addition to the classic reward, each arm is associated with a cost distribution and the goal is to identify the largest reward arm using the minimum expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Kellen Kanarios , Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

This paper is in the field of stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs), i.e. those sequential selection techniques able to learn online using only the feedback given by the chosen option (a.k.a. $arm$). We study a particular case of the rested…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-28 Marco Fiandri , Alberto Maria Metelli , Francesco Trov`o

We study the nonstationary stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem in which the distribution of rewards associated with each arm are assumed to be time-varying and the total variation in the expected rewards is subject to a variation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-25 Lai Wei , Vaibhav Srivastava

We study identifying user clusters in contextual multi-armed bandits (MAB). Contextual MAB is an effective tool for many real applications, such as content recommendation and online advertisement. In practice, user dependency plays an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-27 Yikun Ban , Jingrui He

We focus on the problem of best-arm identification in a stochastic multi-arm bandit with temporally decreasing variances for the arms' rewards. We model arm rewards as Gaussian random variables with fixed means and variances that decrease…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Tamojeet Roychowdhury , Kota Srinivas Reddy , Krishna P Jagannathan , Sharayu Moharir

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) generalize the multi-armed bandits where each arm exhibits Markovian behavior and transitions according to their transition dynamics. Solutions to RMAB exist for both offline and online cases. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Archit Sood , Shweta Jain , Sujit Gujar