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Related papers: The Batch Complexity of Bandit Pure Exploration

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We study the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits with stochastic, potentially private rewards, when the goal is to identify the arm with the highest quantile at a fixed, prescribed level. First, we propose a (non-private)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-06 Kontantinos E. Nikolakakis , Dionysios S. Kalogerias , Or Sheffet , Anand D. Sarwate

Sampling from distributions to find the one with the largest mean arises in a broad range of applications, and it can be mathematically modeled as a multi-armed bandit problem in which each distribution is associated with an arm. This paper…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-06-18 Kevin Jamieson , Matthew Malloy , Robert Nowak , Sebastien Bubeck

We study Thompson Sampling algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits in the batched setting, in which we want to minimize the regret over a sequence of arm pulls using a small number of policy changes (or, batches). We propose two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-17 Nikolai Karpov , Qin Zhang

We study best-arm identification in stochastic multi-armed bandits under the fixed-confidence setting, focusing on instances with multiple optimal arms. Unlike prior work that addresses the unknown-number-of-optimal-arms case, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Lan V. Truong

This paper introduces the framework of multi-armed sampling, which serves as the sampling counterpart to the optimization problem of multi-armed bandits. Our primary motivation is to rigorously examine the exploration-exploitation trade-off…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Mohammad Pedramfar , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

We consider the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits, which focuses purely on exploration. A player is given a fixed budget to explore a finite set of arms, and the rewards of each arm are drawn independently from a fixed,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-08-02 Shahin Shahrampour , Mohammad Noshad , Vahid Tarokh

In the Best-$K$ identification problem (Best-$K$-Arm), we are given $N$ stochastic bandit arms with unknown reward distributions. Our goal is to identify the $K$ arms with the largest means with high confidence, by drawing samples from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-22 Haotian Jiang , Jian Li , Mingda Qiao

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 investigate the problem of batched best arm identification in multi-armed bandits, where we aim to identify the best arm from a set of $n$ arms while minimizing both the number of samples and batches. We introduce an algorithm that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Tianyuan Jin , Qin Zhang , Dongruo Zhou

We consider a multi-armed bandit setting with finitely many arms, in which each arm yields an $M$-dimensional vector reward upon selection. We assume that the reward of each dimension (a.k.a. {\em objective}) is generated independently of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Zhirui Chen , P. N. Karthik , Yeow Meng Chee , Vincent Y. F. Tan

This paper studies the problem of identifying any $k$ distinct arms among the top $\rho$ fraction (e.g., top 5\%) of arms from a finite or infinite set with a probably approximately correct (PAC) tolerance $\epsilon$. We consider two cases:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Wenbo Ren , Jia Liu , Ness Shroff

In this paper, we consider a bandit problem in which there are a number of groups each consisting of infinitely many arms. Whenever a new arm is requested from a given group, its mean reward is drawn from an unknown reservoir distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-02 Ivan Lau , Yan Hao Ling , Mayank Shrivastava , Jonathan Scarlett

We introduce the safe linear stochastic bandit framework---a generalization of linear stochastic bandits---where, in each stage, the learner is required to select an arm with an expected reward that is no less than a predetermined (safe)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-22 Kia Khezeli , Eilyan Bitar

We analyze the sample complexity of the thresholding bandit problem, with and without the assumption that the mean values of the arms are increasing. In each case, we provide a lower bound valid for any risk $\delta$ and any…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-07-25 Aurélien Garivier , Pierre Ménard , Laurent Rossi , Pierre Menard

In this paper, we introduce a multi-armed bandit problem termed max-min grouped bandits, in which the arms are arranged in possibly-overlapping groups, and the goal is to find the group whose worst arm has the highest mean reward. This…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-16 Zhenlin Wang , Jonathan Scarlett

We consider a multi-armed bandit problem where the decision maker can explore and exploit different arms at every round. The exploited arm adds to the decision maker's cumulative reward (without necessarily observing the reward) while the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Orly Avner , Shie Mannor , Ohad Shamir

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

In this paper, we consider the low rank structure of the reward sequence of the pure exploration problems. Firstly, we propose the separated setting in pure exploration problem, where the exploration strategy cannot receive the feedback of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Yaxiong Liu , Atsuyoshi Nakamura , Kohei Hatano , Eiji Takimoto

We propose algorithms based on a multi-level Thompson sampling scheme, for the stochastic multi-armed bandit and its contextual variant with linear expected rewards, in the setting where arms are clustered. We show, both theoretically and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Emil Carlsson , Devdatt Dubhashi , Fredrik D. Johansson

In pure-exploration problems, information is gathered sequentially to answer a question on the stochastic environment. While best-arm identification for linear bandits has been extensively studied in recent years, few works have been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-10 Marc Jourdan , Rémy Degenne