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Related papers: Preference-based Pure Exploration

200 papers

In this paper we revisit the fixed-confidence identification of the Pareto optimal set in a multi-objective multi-armed bandit model. As the sample complexity to identify the exact Pareto set can be very large, a relaxation allowing to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-06 Cyrille Kone , Emilie Kaufmann , Laura Richert

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

Multi-armed bandits (MAB) are commonly used in sequential online decision-making when the reward of each decision is an unknown random variable. In practice however, the typical goal of maximizing total reward may be less important than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Ishank Juneja , Carlee Joe-Wong , Osman Yağan

Pure exploration in bandits formalises multiple real-world problems, such as tuning hyper-parameters or conducting user studies to test a set of items, where different safety, resource, and fairness constraints on the decision space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Udvas Das , Debabrota Basu

We study pure exploration in bandits, where the dimension of the feature representation can be much larger than the number of arms. To overcome the curse of dimensionality, we propose to adaptively embed the feature representation of each…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-18 Yinglun Zhu , Dongruo Zhou , Ruoxi Jiang , Quanquan Gu , Rebecca Willett , Robert Nowak

We determine the sample complexity of pure exploration bandit problems with multiple good answers. We derive a lower bound using a new game equilibrium argument. We show how continuity and convexity properties of single-answer problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-12 Rémy Degenne , Wouter M. Koolen

Prompt engineering has become central to eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). At its core lies prompt selection -- efficiently identifying the most effective prompts. However, most prior investigations overlook a key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Donghao Li , Chengshuai Shi , Weijuan Ou , Cong Shen , Jing Yang

We study the real-valued combinatorial pure exploration of the multi-armed bandit (R-CPE-MAB) problem. In R-CPE-MAB, a player is given $d$ stochastic arms, and the reward of each arm $s\in\{1, \ldots, d\}$ follows an unknown distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Shintaro Nakamura , Masashi Sugiyama

In bandit best-arm identification, an algorithm is tasked with finding the arm with highest mean reward with a specified accuracy as fast as possible. We study multi-fidelity best-arm identification, in which the algorithm can choose to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Riccardo Poiani , Rémy Degenne , Emilie Kaufmann , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

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 advance the study of incentivized bandit exploration, in which arm choices are viewed as recommendations and are required to be Bayesian incentive compatible. Recent work has shown under certain independence assumptions that after…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Mark Sellke

We study the problem of stochastic combinatorial pure exploration (CPE), where an agent sequentially pulls a set of single arms (a.k.a. a super arm) and tries to find the best super arm. Among a variety of problem settings of the CPE, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Yuko Kuroki , Liyuan Xu , Atsushi Miyauchi , Junya Honda , Masashi Sugiyama

We introduce the \emph{Correlated Preference Bandits} problem with random utility-based choice models (RUMs), where the goal is to identify the best item from a given pool of $n$ items through online subsetwise preference feedback. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Suprovat Ghoshal , Aadirupa Saha

We consider the Max $K$-Armed Bandit problem, where a learning agent is faced with several sources (arms) of items (rewards), and interested in finding the best item overall. At each time step the agent chooses an arm, and obtains a random…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-08-25 Yahel David , Nahum Shimkin

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

Multi-objective multi-armed bandit (MO-MAB) problems traditionally aim to achieve Pareto optimality. However, real-world scenarios often involve users with varying preferences across objectives, resulting in a Pareto-optimal arm that may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Linfeng Cao , Ming Shi , Ness B. Shroff

We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed confidence in stochastic linear bandits. The objective is to identify the best arm with a given level of certainty while minimizing the sampling budget. We devise a simple algorithm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-30 Yassir Jedra , Alexandre Proutiere

In multi-armed bandit problems, the typical goal is to identify the arm with the highest reward. This paper explores a threshold-based bandit problem, aiming to select an arm based on its relation to a prescribed threshold \(\tau \). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Chanakya Varude , Jay Chaudhary , Siddharth Kaushik , Prasanna Chaporkar

We design new algorithms for the combinatorial pure exploration problem in the multi-arm bandit framework. In this problem, we are given $K$ distributions and a collection of subsets $\mathcal{V} \subset 2^{[K]}$ of these distributions, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-29 Tongyi Cao , Akshay Krishnamurthy

In this paper, we study a variant of best-arm identification involving elements of risk sensitivity and communication constraints. Specifically, the goal of the learner is to identify the arm with the highest quantile reward, while the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Ivan Lau , Jonathan Scarlett