English
Related papers

Related papers: Best Arm Identification with Possibly Biased Offli…

200 papers

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

This paper considers a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem with dual objectives: (i) quick identification and commitment to the optimal arm, and (ii) reward maximization throughout a sequence of $T$ consecutive rounds. Though each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

Combinatorial bandits extend the classical bandit framework to settings where the learner selects multiple arms in each round, motivated by applications such as online recommendation and assortment optimization. While extensions of upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Yuxiao Wen , Yanjun Han , Zhengyuan Zhou

Multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a class of online learning problems where a learning agent aims to maximize its expected cumulative reward while repeatedly selecting to pull arms with unknown reward distributions. We consider a scenario where…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-25 Yang Cao , Zheng Wen , Branislav Kveton , Yao Xie

While classical formulations of multi-armed bandit problems assume that each arm's reward is independent and stationary, real-world applications often involve non-stationary environments and interdependencies between arms. In particular,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Ryoma Sato , Shinji Ito

We study the fixed-confidence best arm identification (BAI) problem within the multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework under the Entropic Value-at-Risk (EVaR) criterion. Our analysis considers a nonparametric setting, allowing for general reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Mehrasa Ahmadipour , Aurélien Garivier

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

We study the best-arm identification (BAI) problem with a fixed budget and contextual (covariate) information. In each round of an adaptive experiment, after observing contextual information, we choose a treatment arm using past…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Masahiro Kato , Masaaki Imaizumi , Takuya Ishihara , Toru Kitagawa

We study the problem of best arm identification with a fairness constraint in a given causal model. The goal is to find a soft intervention on a given node to maximize the outcome while meeting a fairness constraint by counterfactual…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-11-09 Ruijiang Gao , Han Feng

We consider the problem of best arm identification in a variant of multi-armed bandits called linked bandits. In a single interaction with linked bandits, multiple arms are played sequentially until one of them receives a positive reward.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Anant Gupta

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

This paper studies two variants of the best arm identification (BAI) problem under the streaming model, where we have a stream of $n$ arms with reward distributions supported on $[0,1]$ with unknown means. The arms in the stream are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Tianyuan Jin , Keke Huang , Jing Tang , Xiaokui Xiao

The challenge of identifying the best feasible arm within a fixed budget has attracted considerable interest in recent years. However, a notable gap remains in the literature: the exact exponential rate at which the error probability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Jie Bian , Vincent Y. F. Tan

We introduce Box Thirding (B3), a flexible and efficient algorithm for Best Arm Identification (BAI) under fixed-budget constraints. It is designed for both anytime BAI and scenarios with large N, where the number of arms is too large for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-23 Seohwa Hwang , Junyong Park

We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem where an underlying network structure enables side-observations across related actions. We use a bipartite graph to link actions to a set of unknowns, such that selecting an action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Ashutosh Soni , Peizhong Ju , Atilla Eryilmaz , Ness B. Shroff

This paper considers the problem of online clustering with bandit feedback. A set of arms (or items) can be partitioned into various groups that are unknown. Within each group, the observations associated to each of the arms follow the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Junwen Yang , Zixin Zhong , Vincent Y. F. Tan

This paper formulates a new Best-Arm Identification problem in the non-stationary stochastic bandits setting, where the means of all arms are shifted in the same way due to a global influence of the environment. The aim is to identify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Phurinut Srisawad , Juergen Branke , Long Tran-Thanh

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 representative arm identification (RAI) problem in the multi-armed bandits (MAB) framework, wherein we have a collection of arms, each associated with an unknown reward distribution. An underlying instance is defined by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Sarvesh Gharat , Aniket Yadav , Nikhil Karamchandani , Jayakrishnan Nair

This study investigates the contextual best arm identification (BAI) problem, aiming to design an adaptive experiment to identify the best treatment arm conditioned on contextual information (covariates). We consider a decision-maker who…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Masahiro Kato , Kyohei Okumura , Takuya Ishihara , Toru Kitagawa