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Related papers: Preference-based Pure Exploration

200 papers

Pure exploration in episodic Reinforcement Learning has primarily focused on Best Policy Identification (BPI), which seeks to identify a (near)-optimal policy with high confidence. Motivated by practical settings where a ``good enough''…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

This paper investigates the problem of best arm identification in $\textit{contaminated}$ stochastic multi-arm bandits. In this setting, the rewards obtained from any arm are replaced by samples from an adversarial model with probability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Arpan Mukherjee , Ali Tajer , Pin-Yu Chen , Payel Das

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

In this paper, we study the multi-objective bandits (MOB) problem, where a learner repeatedly selects one arm to play and then receives a reward vector consisting of multiple objectives. MOB has found many real-world applications as varied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Shiyin Lu , Guanghui Wang , Yao Hu , Lijun Zhang

The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Avrim Blum , Marten Garicano , Kavya Ravichandran , Dravyansh Sharma

Bandits with preference feedback present a powerful tool for optimizing unknown target functions when only pairwise comparisons are allowed instead of direct value queries. This model allows for incorporating human feedback into online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Barna Pásztor , Parnian Kassraie , Andreas Krause

We study the sample complexity of pure exploration in an online learning problem with a feedback graph. This graph dictates the feedback available to the learner, covering scenarios between full-information, pure bandit feedback, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Alessio Russo , Yichen Song , Aldo Pacchiano

Classification bandits are multi-armed bandit problems whose task is to classify a given set of arms into either positive or negative class depending on whether the rate of the arms with the expected reward of at least h is not less than w…

This paper considers a multi-armed bandit game where the number of arms is much larger than the maximum budget and is effectively infinite. We characterize necessary and sufficient conditions on the total budget for an algorithm to return…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-15 Maryam Aziz , Kevin Jamieson , Javed Aslam

We study a multi-objective pure exploration problem in a multi-armed bandit model. Each arm is associated to an unknown multi-variate distribution and the goal is to identify the distributions whose mean is not uniformly worse than that of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-15 Cyrille Kone , Emilie Kaufmann , Laura Richert

This paper studies the Best-of-K Bandit game: At each time the player chooses a subset S among all N-choose-K possible options and observes reward max(X(i) : i in S) where X is a random vector drawn from a joint distribution. The objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-22 Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson , Benjamin Recht

For a real-world decision-making problem, the reward function often needs to be engineered or learned. A popular approach is to utilize human feedback to learn a reward function for training. The most straightforward way to do so is to ask…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Xiang Ji , Huazheng Wang , Minshuo Chen , Tuo Zhao , Mengdi Wang

Motivated by recommendation problems in music streaming platforms, we propose a nonstationary stochastic bandit model in which the expected reward of an arm depends on the number of rounds that have passed since the arm was last pulled.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-20 Leonardo Cella , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

Pure exploration (aka active testing) is the fundamental task of sequentially gathering information to answer a query about a stochastic environment. Good algorithms make few mistakes and take few samples. Lower bounds (for multi-armed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-26 Rémy Degenne , Wouter M. Koolen , Pierre Ménard

We study an online stochastic matching problem in which an algorithm sequentially matches $U$ users to $K$ arms, aiming to maximize cumulative reward over $T$ rounds under budget constraints. Without structural assumptions, computing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Omer Ben-Porat , Gur Keinan , Rotem Torkan

We study the Pareto Set Identification (PSI) problem in a structured multi-output linear bandit model. In this setting, each arm is associated a feature vector belonging to $\mathbb{R}^h$, and its mean vector in $\mathbb{R}^d$ linearly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-08 Cyrille Kone , Emilie Kaufmann , Laura Richert

In the Best-$k$-Arm problem, we are given $n$ stochastic bandit arms, each associated with an unknown reward distribution. We are required to identify the $k$ arms with the largest means by taking as few samples as possible. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-15 Lijie Chen , Jian Li , Mingda Qiao

We formulate, analyze and solve the problem of best arm identification with fairness constraints on subpopulations (BAICS). Standard best arm identification problems aim at selecting an arm that has the largest expected reward where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Yuhang Wu , Zeyu Zheng , Tingyu Zhu

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting where reward must be actively queried for it to be observed. We provide tight lower and upper problem-dependent guarantees on both the regret and the number of queries. Interestingly, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Nadav Merlis , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

We study the fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) problem in non-stationary linear bandits. Concretely, given a fixed time budget $T\in \mathbb{N}$, finite arm set $\mathcal{X} \subset \mathbb{R}^d$, and a potentially adversarial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-12 Leo Maynard-Zhang , Zhihan Xiong , Kevin Jamieson , Maryam Fazel
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