Related papers: Preference-based Pure Exploration

This paper studies the fixed-confidence best arm identification (BAI) problem in the bandit framework in the canonical single-parameter exponential models. For this problem, many policies have been proposed, but most of them require solving…

This paper proposes near-optimal algorithms for the pure-exploration linear bandit problem in the fixed confidence and fixed budget settings. Leveraging ideas from the theory of suprema of empirical processes, we provide an algorithm whose…

A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…

Recent progress in model selection raises the question of the fundamental limits of these techniques. Under specific scrutiny has been model selection for general contextual bandits with nested policy classes, resulting in a COLT2020 open…

In this paper, we introduce the constrained best mixed arm identification (CBMAI) problem with a fixed budget. This is a pure exploration problem in a stochastic finite armed bandit model. Each arm is associated with a reward and multiple…

We introduce and study a new class of stochastic bandit problems, referred to as predictive bandits. In each round, the decision maker first decides whether to gather information about the rewards of particular arms (so that their rewards…

We study model selection in linear bandits, where the learner must adapt to the dimension (denoted by $d_\star$) of the smallest hypothesis class containing the true linear model while balancing exploration and exploitation. Previous papers…

While experimental design often focuses on selecting the single best alternative from a finite set (e.g., in ranking and selection or best-arm identification), many pure-exploration problems pursue richer goals. Given a specific goal,…

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) replaces reward values in traditional reinforcement learning by preferences to better elicit human opinion on the target objective, especially when numerical reward values are hard to design or…

We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…

We consider Pareto front identification (PFI) for linear bandits (PFILin), i.e., the goal is to identify a set of arms with undominated mean reward vectors when the mean reward vector is a linear function of the context. PFILin includes the…

Motivated by drug design, we consider the best-arm identification problem in generalized linear bandits. More specifically, we assume each arm has a vector of covariates, there is an unknown vector of parameters that is common across the…

We give a complete characterization of the complexity of best-arm identification in one-parameter bandit problems. We prove a new, tight lower bound on the sample complexity. We propose the `Track-and-Stop' strategy, which we prove to be…

Decision making under uncertain environments in the maximization of expected reward while minimizing its risk is one of the ubiquitous problems in many subjects. Here, we introduce a novel problem setting in stochastic bandit optimization…

Modifying the reward-biased maximum likelihood method originally proposed in the adaptive control literature, we propose novel learning algorithms to handle the explore-exploit trade-off in linear bandits problems as well as generalized…

We study the problem of sequential learning of the Pareto front in multi-objective multi-armed bandits. An agent is faced with K possible arms to pull. At each turn she picks one, and receives a vector-valued reward. When she thinks she has…

Pure exploration is one of the fundamental problems in multi-armed bandits (MAB). However, existing works mostly focus on specific pure exploration tasks, without a holistic view of the general pure exploration problem. This work fills this…

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…

We consider the problem of best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit model, under fixed confidence. Given a confidence input $\delta$, the goal is to identify the arm with the highest mean reward with a probability of at least 1 --…

Causal knowledge can be used to support decision-making problems. This has been recognized in the causal bandits literature, where a causal (multi-armed) bandit is characterized by a causal graphical model and a target variable. The arms…