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We consider a stochastic bandit problem with a possibly infinite number of arms. We write $p^*$ for the proportion of optimal arms and $\Delta$ for the minimal mean-gap between optimal and sub-optimal arms. We characterize the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Rianne de Heide , James Cheshire , Pierre Ménard , Alexandra Carpentier

Motivated by the cost heterogeneity in experimentation across different alternatives, we study the Best Arm Identification with Resource Constraints (BAIwRC) problem. The agent aims to identify the best arm under resource constraints, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

Multi-armed bandit problems are considered as a paradigm of the trade-off between exploring the environment to find profitable actions and exploiting what is already known. In the stationary case, the distributions of the rewards do not…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-12-18 Aurélien Garivier , Eric Moulines

In good arm identification (GAI), the goal is to identify one arm whose average performance exceeds a given threshold, referred to as a good arm, if it exists. Few works have studied GAI in the fixed-budget setting when the sampling budget…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-08 Marc Jourdan , Andrée Delahaye-Duriez , Clémence Réda

We propose a novel variant of the UCB algorithm (referred to as Efficient-UCB-Variance (EUCBV)) for minimizing cumulative regret in the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. EUCBV incorporates the arm elimination strategy proposed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-12 Subhojyoti Mukherjee , K. P. Naveen , Nandan Sudarsanam , Balaraman Ravindran

Multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a widely adopted framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Traditional bandit algorithms rely solely on online data, which tends to be scarce as it must be gathered during the online phase when…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Wenlong Ji , Yihan Pan , Ruihao Zhu , Lihua Lei

Much of the literature on optimal design of bandit algorithms is based on minimization of expected regret. It is well known that designs that are optimal over certain exponential families can achieve expected regret that grows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Lin Fan , Peter W. Glynn

We investigate the problem of fixed-budget best arm identification (BAI) for minimizing expected simple regret. In an adaptive experiment, a decision maker draws one of multiple treatment arms based on past observations and observes the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Masahiro Kato , Masaaki Imaizumi , Takuya Ishihara , Toru Kitagawa

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…

As an extension of the classical multi-armed bandit problem, multi-fidelity multi-armed bandits (MF-MAB) enable individual arms to be evaluated using diverse feedback sources that vary in both cost and accuracy. Prior stochastic models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Muyun Lu , Haoyang Hong , Huazheng Wang , Ying Lin

The combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) is a fundamental sequential decision-making framework, extensively studied over the past decade. However, existing work primarily focuses on the online setting, overlooking the substantial costs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Xutong Liu , Xiangxiang Dai , Jinhang Zuo , Siwei Wang , Carlee Joe-Wong , John C. S. Lui , Wei Chen

In this paper, we study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with graph feedback. Motivated by the clinical trials and recommendation problem, we assume that two arms are connected if and only if they are similar (i.e., their means are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Han Qi , Guo Fei , Li Zhu

We study the Pareto frontier of two archetypal objectives in multi-armed bandits, namely, regret minimization (RM) and best arm identification (BAI) with a fixed horizon. It is folklore that the balance between exploitation and exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Zixin Zhong , Wang Chi Cheung , Vincent Y. F. Tan

In multi-objective decision-making with hierarchical preferences, lexicographic bandits provide a natural framework for optimizing multiple objectives in a prioritized order. In this setting, a learner repeatedly selects arms and observes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Bo Xue , Yuanyu Wan , Zhichao Lu , Qingfu Zhang

Most algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem in reinforcement learning aimed to maximize the expected reward, which are thus useful in searching the optimized candidate with the highest reward (function value) for diverse applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Bin Chong , Yingguang Yang , Zi-Le Wang , Hang Xing , Zhirong Liu

In many fields such as digital marketing, healthcare, finance, and robotics, it is common to have a well-tested and reliable baseline policy running in production (e.g., a recommender system). Nonetheless, the baseline policy is often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-11 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

Given a finite set of unknown distributions or arms that can be sampled, we consider the problem of identifying the one with the maximum mean using a $\delta$-correct algorithm (an adaptive, sequential algorithm that restricts the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Shubhada Agrawal , Sandeep Juneja , Peter Glynn

This paper studies a decentralized homogeneous multi-armed bandit problem in a multi-agent network. The problem is simultaneously solved by $N$ agents assuming they face a common set of $M$ arms and share the same arms' reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Jingxuan Zhu , Ethan Mulle , Christopher S. Smith , Alec Koppel , Ji Liu

We consider a variant of the classic multi-armed bandit problem where the expected reward of each arm is a function of an unknown parameter. The arms are divided into different groups, each of which has a common parameter. Therefore, when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-23 Zhiyang Wang , Ruida Zhou , Cong Shen

Contextual multi-armed bandits (CMAB) have been widely used for learning to filter and prioritize information according to a user's interest. In this work, we analyze top-K ranking under the CMAB framework where the top-K arms are chosen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-31 Michael Rawson , Jade Freeman