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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 consider the decentralized exploration problem: a set of players collaborate to identify the best arm by asynchronously interacting with the same stochastic environment. The objective is to insure privacy in the best arm identification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Raphaël Féraud , Réda Alami , Romain Laroche

We address the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with a fixed budget for two-armed Gaussian bandits. In BAI, given multiple arms, we aim to find the best arm, an arm with the highest expected reward, through an adaptive experiment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Masahiro Kato

The paper proposes a novel upper confidence bound (UCB) procedure for identifying the arm with the largest mean in a multi-armed bandit game in the fixed confidence setting using a small number of total samples. The procedure cannot be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-12-30 Kevin Jamieson , Matthew Malloy , Robert Nowak , Sébastien Bubeck

We investigate an active pure-exploration setting, that includes best-arm identification, in the context of linear stochastic bandits. While asymptotically optimal algorithms exist for standard multi-arm bandits, the existence of such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-03 Rémy Degenne , Pierre Ménard , Xuedong Shang , Michal Valko

Preference-based Pure Exploration (PrePEx) aims to identify with a given confidence level the set of Pareto optimal arms in a vector-valued (aka multi-objective) bandit, where the reward vectors are ordered via a (given) preference cone…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Udvas Das , Apurv Shukla , Debabrota Basu

In this paper, we consider the multi-armed bandit problem with high-dimensional features. First, we prove a minimax lower bound, $\mathcal{O}\big((\log d)^{\frac{\alpha+1}{2}}T^{\frac{1-\alpha}{2}}+\log T\big)$, for the cumulative regret,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Ke Li , Yun Yang , Naveen N. Narisetty

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 give nearly-tight upper and lower bounds for the improving multi-armed bandits problem. An instance of this problem has $k$ arms, each of whose reward function is a concave and increasing function of the number of times that arm has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Avrim Blum , Kavya Ravichandran

This paper studies two variants of the best arm identification (BAI) problem under the streaming model, where we have a stream of $n$ arms with reward distributions supported on $[0,1]$ with unknown means. The arms in the stream are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Tianyuan Jin , Keke Huang , Jing Tang , Xiaokui Xiao

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 investigate the fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) problem for linear bandits in a potentially non-stationary environment. Given a finite arm set $\mathcal{X}\subset\mathbb{R}^d$, a fixed budget $T$, and an unpredictable sequence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Zhihan Xiong , Romain Camilleri , Maryam Fazel , Lalit Jain , Kevin Jamieson

Best arm identification (BAI) aims to identify the highest-performance arm among a set of $K$ arms by collecting stochastic samples from each arm. In real-world problems, the best arm needs to satisfy additional feasibility constraints.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Ting Cai , Kirthevasan Kandasamy

Given a vector of probability distributions, or arms, each of which can be sampled independently, we consider the problem of identifying the partition to which this vector belongs from a finitely partitioned universe of such vector of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-06 Sandeep Juneja , Subhashini Krishnasamy

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 consider a variant of the best arm identification (BAI) problem in multi-armed bandits (MAB) in which there are two sets of arms (source and target), and the objective is to determine the best target arm while only pulling source arms.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Ojash Neopane , Aaditya Ramdas , Aarti Singh

This paper considers a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem with dual objectives: (i) quick identification and commitment to the optimal arm, and (ii) reward maximization throughout a sequence of $T$ consecutive rounds. Though each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Adrienne Tuynman , Rémy Degenne

We study the stochastic linear bandit problem with multiple arms over $T$ rounds, where the covariate dimension $d$ may exceed $T$, but each arm-specific parameter vector is $s$-sparse. We begin by analyzing the sequential estimation…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-05-26 Jingyu Liu , Yanglei Song

Algorithms for the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem play a central role in sequential decision-making and have been extensively explored both theoretically and numerically. While most classical approaches aim to identify the arm with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Gabriel Turinici