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Real-time status updating applications increasingly rely on networks of devices and edge nodes to maintain data freshness, as quantified by the age of information (AoI) metric. Given that edge computing nodes exhibit uncertain and…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Mengqiu Zhou , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Meng Zhang

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

The knowledge gradient (KG) algorithm is a popular policy for the best arm identification (BAI) problem. It is built on the simple idea of always choosing the measurement that yields the greatest expected one-step improvement in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Yang Le , Gao Siyang , Ho Chin Pang

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

In the classical best arm identification (Best-$1$-Arm) problem, we are given $n$ stochastic bandit arms, each associated with a reward distribution with an unknown mean. We would like to identify the arm with the largest mean with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-25 Lijie Chen , Jian Li , Mingda Qiao

We propose the first fully-adaptive algorithm for pure exploration in linear bandits---the task to find the arm with the largest expected reward, which depends on an unknown parameter linearly. While existing methods partially or entirely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-17 Liyuan Xu , Junya Honda , Masashi Sugiyama

We consider the problem of near-optimal arm identification in the fixed confidence setting of the infinitely armed bandit problem when nothing is known about the arm reservoir distribution. We (1) introduce a PAC-like framework within which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-22 Maryam Aziz , Jesse Anderton , Emilie Kaufmann , Javed Aslam

We study the batched best arm identification (BBAI) problem, where the learner's goal is to identify the best arm while switching the policy as less as possible. In particular, we aim to find the best arm with probability $1-\delta$ for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Tianyuan Jin , Yu Yang , Jing Tang , Xiaokui Xiao , Pan Xu

In many applications, evaluating the effectiveness of different alternatives comes with varying costs or resource usage. Motivated by such heterogeneity, we study the Best Arm Identification with Resource Constraints (BAIwRC) problem, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

We study the stochastic Budgeted Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, where a player chooses from $K$ arms with unknown expected rewards and costs. The goal is to maximize the total reward under a budget constraint. A player thus seeks to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-16 Marco Heyden , Vadim Arzamasov , Edouard Fouché , Klemens Böhm

Recent work has considered natural variations of the multi-armed bandit problem, where the reward distribution of each arm is a special function of the time passed since its last pulling. In this direction, a simple (yet widely applicable)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Alexia Atsidakou , Orestis Papadigenopoulos , Soumya Basu , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

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

The expected improvement (EI) algorithm is a popular strategy for information collection in optimization under uncertainty. The algorithm is widely known to be too greedy, but nevertheless enjoys wide use due to its simplicity and ability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-30 Chao Qin , Diego Klabjan , Daniel Russo

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Chanakya Varude , Jay Chaudhary , Siddharth Kaushik , Prasanna Chaporkar

In this work I study the problem of adversarial perturbations to rewards, in a Multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. Specifically, I focus on an adversarial attack to a UCB type best-arm identification policy applied to a stochastic MAB. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Varsha Pendyala

We consider fixed-budget best-arm identification in two-armed Gaussian bandit problems. One of the longstanding open questions is the existence of an optimal strategy under which the probability of misidentification matches a lower bound.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-02 Masahiro Kato , Kaito Ariu , Masaaki Imaizumi , Masahiro Nomura , Chao Qin

The classic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem tackles the challenge of accruing maximum reward while making decisions under uncertainty. However, in applications, often the goal is to minimize cost subject to a constraint on the minimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Ishank Juneja , Carlee Joe-Wong , Osman Yağan

We study a regret minimization problem with the existence of multiple best/near-optimal arms in the multi-armed bandit setting. We consider the case when the number of arms/actions is comparable or much larger than the time horizon, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-23 Yinglun Zhu , Robert Nowak

Motivated by modern applications, such as online advertisement and recommender systems, we study the top-$k$ extreme contextual bandits problem, where the total number of arms can be enormous, and the learner is allowed to select $k$ arms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-17 Rajat Sen , Alexander Rakhlin , Lexing Ying , Rahul Kidambi , Dean Foster , Daniel Hill , Inderjit Dhillon

We study fixed-confidence best-arm identification (BAI) where a cheap but potentially biased proxy (e.g., LLM judge) is available for every sample, while an expensive ground-truth label can only be acquired selectively when using a human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Ruicheng Ao , Hongyu Chen , Siyang Gao , Hanwei Li , David Simchi-Levi