English
Related papers

Related papers: Optimal Best-Arm Identification under Fixed Confid…

200 papers

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

We lay the foundations of a non-parametric theory of best-arm identification in multi-armed bandits with a fixed budget T. We consider general, possibly non-parametric, models D for distributions over the arms; an overarching example is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Antoine Barrier , Aurélien Garivier , Gilles Stoltz

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'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Anmol Kagrecha , Jayakrishnan Nair , Krishna Jagannathan

We present a provably optimal differentially private algorithm for the stochastic multi-arm bandit problem, as opposed to the private analogue of the UCB-algorithm [Mishra and Thakurta, 2015; Tossou and Dimitrakakis, 2016] which doesn't…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-24 Touqir Sajed , Or Sheffet

We consider the problem of identifying any $k$ out of the best $m$ arms in an $n$-armed stochastic multi-armed bandit. Framed in the PAC setting, this particular problem generalises both the problem of `best subset selection' and that of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-25 Arghya Roy Chaudhuri , Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan

In this paper, we address the problem of identifying the Pareto Set under feasibility constraints in a multivariate bandit setting. Specifically, given a $K$-armed bandit with unknown means $\mu_1, \dots, \mu_K \in \mathbb{R}^d$, the goal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-11 Cyrille Kone , Emilie Kaufmann , Laura Richert

In the Best-$k$-Arm problem, we are given $n$ stochastic bandit arms, each associated with an unknown reward distribution. We are required to identify the $k$ arms with the largest means by taking as few samples as possible. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-15 Lijie Chen , Jian Li , Mingda Qiao

We study best-arm identification with fixed confidence in bandit models with graph smoothness constraint. We provide and analyze an efficient gradient ascent algorithm to compute the sample complexity of this problem as a solution of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-21 Tomáš Kocák , Aurélien Garivier

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

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

The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Avrim Blum , Marten Garicano , Kavya Ravichandran , Dravyansh Sharma

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 best-arm identification problem in linear bandit, where the rewards of the arms depend linearly on an unknown parameter $\theta^*$ and the objective is to return the arm with the largest reward. We characterize the complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-11-05 Marta Soare , Alessandro Lazaric , Rémi Munos

Motivated by the need to efficiently identify multiple candidates in high trial-and-error cost tasks such as drug discovery, we propose a near-optimal algorithm to identify all {\epsilon}-best arms (i.e., those at most {\epsilon} worse than…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-02 Zhekai Li , Tianyi Ma , Cheng Hua , Ruihao Zhu

We study the best arm identification (BEST-1-ARM) problem, which is defined as follows. We are given $n$ stochastic bandit arms. The $i$th arm has a reward distribution $D_i$ with an unknown mean $\mu_{i}$. Upon each play of the $i$th arm,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-24 Lijie Chen , Jian Li

We propose a generalization of the best arm identification problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) to the setting where every pull of an arm is associated with delayed feedback. The delay in feedback increases the effective sample…

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

We consider the fixed-budget best arm identification problem where the goal is to find the arm of the largest mean with a fixed number of samples. It is known that the probability of misidentifying the best arm is exponentially small to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-28 Junpei Komiyama , Taira Tsuchiya , Junya Honda

We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a multi-armed bandit environment when each arm is a time-homogeneous and ergodic discrete-time Markov process on a common, finite state space. The state evolution on each arm is governed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-30 P. N. Karthik , Kota Srinivas Reddy , Vincent Y. F. Tan

In this paper we consider the problem of best-arm identification in multi-armed bandits in the fixed confidence setting, where the goal is to identify, with probability $1-\delta$ for some $\delta>0$, the arm with the highest mean reward in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-13 Samarth Gupta , Gauri Joshi , Osman Yağan