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Multi-armed bandits (MAB) are commonly used in sequential online decision-making when the reward of each decision is an unknown random variable. In practice however, the typical goal of maximizing total reward may be less important than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Ishank Juneja , Carlee Joe-Wong , Osman Yağan

In the classic multi-armed bandits problem, the goal is to have a policy for dynamically operating arms that each yield stochastic rewards with unknown means. The key metric of interest is regret, defined as the gap between the expected…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2010-11-23 Yi Gai , Bhaskar Krishnamachari , Rahul Jain

We propose a novel technique for analyzing adaptive sampling called the {\em Simulator}. Our approach differs from the existing methods by considering not how much information could be gathered by any fixed sampling strategy, but how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson , Benjamin Recht

Modern platforms leverage randomized experiments to make informed decisions from a given set of items (``treatments''). As a particularly challenging scenario, these items may (i) arrive in high volume, with thousands of new items being…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Su Jia , Andrew Li , R. Ravi , Nishant Oli , Paul Duff , Ian Anderson

We study best-arm identification in stochastic dueling bandits under the sole assumption that a Condorcet winner exists, i.e., an arm that wins each noisy pairwise comparison with probability at least $1/2$. We introduce a new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-17 El Mehdi Saad , Victor Thuot , Nicolas Verzelen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Joon Kwon , Vianney Perchet , Claire Vernade

In several applications such as clinical trials and financial portfolio optimization, the expected value (or the average reward) does not satisfactorily capture the merits of a drug or a portfolio. In such applications, risk plays a crucial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-13 Vincent Y. F. Tan , Prashanth L. A. , Krishna Jagannathan

We study the problem of selecting $K$ arms with the highest expected rewards in a stochastic $n$-armed bandit game. This problem has a wide range of applications, e.g., A/B testing, crowdsourcing, simulation optimization. Our goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Jiecao Chen , Xi Chen , Qin Zhang , Yuan Zhou

We consider the stochastic and adversarial settings of continuum armed bandits where the arms are indexed by [0,1]^d. The reward functions r:[0,1]^d -> R are assumed to intrinsically depend on at most k coordinate variables implying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-08-25 Hemant Tyagi , Bernd Gärtner

We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator. Existing approaches to the related problem of inverse reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-23 Wenshuo Guo , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Aditya Grover , Vidya Muthukumar , Ashwin Pananjady

We study the problem of best-arm identification in a distributed variant of the multi-armed bandit setting, with a central learner and multiple agents. Each agent is associated with an arm of the bandit, generating stochastic rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-02 Fathima Zarin Faizal , Adway Girish , Manjesh Kumar Hanawal , Nikhil Karamchandani

We study the problem of best arm identification in a federated learning multi-armed bandit setup with a central server and multiple clients. Each client is associated with a multi-armed bandit in which each arm yields {\em i.i.d.}\ rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-21 Kota Srinivas Reddy , P. N. Karthik , Vincent Y. F. Tan

The bias of the sample means of the arms in multi-armed bandits is an important issue in adaptive data analysis that has recently received considerable attention in the literature. Existing results relate in precise ways the sign and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-02-24 Jaehyeok Shin , Aaditya Ramdas , Alessandro Rinaldo

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classic example of the exploration-exploitation dilemma. It is concerned with maximising the total rewards for a gambler by sequentially pulling an arm from a multi-armed slot machine where each arm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-16 Xue Lu , Niall Adams , Nikolas Kantas

We study the problem of learning 'good' interventions in a stochastic environment modeled by its underlying causal graph. Good interventions refer to interventions that maximize rewards. Specifically, we consider the setting of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Fateme Jamshidi , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

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

This paper focuses on selecting the arm with the highest variance from a set of $K$ independent arms. Specifically, we focus on two settings: (i) misallocation minimization setting, that penalizes the number of pulls of suboptimal arms in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Sabrina Khurshid , Gourab Ghatak , Mohammad Shahid Abdulla

In a linear stochastic bandit model, each arm is a vector in an Euclidean space and the observed return at each time step is an unknown linear function of the chosen arm at that time step. In this paper, we investigate the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-25 Qiyu Kang , Wee Peng Tay

This paper investigates a hitherto unaddressed aspect of best arm identification (BAI) in stochastic multi-armed bandits in the fixed-confidence setting. Two key metrics for assessing bandit algorithms are computational efficiency and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-26 Arpan Mukherjee , Ali Tajer

Multi-arm bandits are gaining popularity as they enable real-world sequential decision-making across application areas, including clinical trials, recommender systems, and online decision-making. Consequently, there is an increased desire…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-03-01 Dae Woong Ham , Iavor Bojinov , Michael Lindon , Martin Tingley