Related papers: The Batch Complexity of Bandit Pure Exploration
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…
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…
In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, d arms are available to the decision maker who pulls them sequentially in order to maximize his cumulative reward. Guarantees can be obtained on a relative quantity called regret, which scales…
We introduce the model selection problem in pure exploration linear bandits, where the learner needs to adapt to the instance-dependent complexity measure of the smallest hypothesis class containing the true model. We design algorithms in…
Drawing a sample from a discrete distribution is one of the building components for Monte Carlo methods. Like other sampling algorithms, discrete sampling suffers from the high computational burden in large-scale inference problems. We…
We study batched bandit experiments and consider the problem of inference conditional on the realized stopping time, assignment probabilities, and target parameter, where all of these may be chosen adaptively using information up to the…
In the infinite-armed bandit problem, each arm's average reward is sampled from an unknown distribution, and each arm can be sampled further to obtain noisy estimates of the average reward of that arm. Prior work focuses on identifying the…
Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) formulations usually make certain assumptions about the underlying arms' distributions, such as bounds on the support or their tail behaviour. Moreover, such parametric information is usually 'baked'…
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…
We consider the query recommendation problem in closed loop interactive learning settings like online information gathering and exploratory analytics. The problem can be naturally modelled using the Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework with…
We provide a tight bound on the amount of experimentation under the optimal strategy in sequential decision problems. We show the applicability of the result by providing a bound on the cut-off in a one-arm bandit problem.
This paper considers the problem of maximizing an expectation function over a finite set, or finite-arm bandit problem. We first propose a naive stochastic bandit algorithm for obtaining a probably approximately correct (PAC) solution to…
This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of collaborative bandit algorithms and provides a thorough comparison of their performance. Collaborative bandits aim to improve the performance of contextual bandits by introducing relationships…
What can an agent learn in a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem from a dataset that contains just a single sample for each arm? Surprisingly, in this work, we demonstrate that even in such a data-starved setting it may still be…
Reinforcement learning studies how to balance exploration and exploitation in real-world systems, optimizing interactions with the world while simultaneously learning how the world operates. One general class of algorithms for such learning…
We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same…
Identifying the best arm of a multi-armed bandit is a central problem in bandit optimization. We study a quantum computational version of this problem with coherent oracle access to states encoding the reward probabilities of each arm as…
Existing methods of combinatorial pure exploration mainly focus on the UCB approach. To make the algorithm efficient, they usually use the sum of upper confidence bounds within arm set $S$ to represent the upper confidence bound of $S$,…
The 1-identification problem is a fundamental pure-exploration problem in multi-armed bandits. An agent aims to determine whether there exists an arm whose mean reward exceeds a known threshold $\mu_0$, or to output \textsf{None} otherwise.…
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…