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Related papers: Minimax and Bayes Optimal Best-Arm Identification

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We study the nonstationary stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem in which the distribution of rewards associated with each arm are assumed to be time-varying and the total variation in the expected rewards is subject to a variation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-25 Lai Wei , Vaibhav Srivastava

Stochastic multi-armed bandits are a sequential-decision-making framework, where, at each interaction step, the learner selects an arm and observes a stochastic reward. Within the context of best-arm identification (BAI) problems, the goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Riccardo Poiani , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

A standard assumption adopted in the multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework is that the mean rewards are constant over time. This assumption can be restrictive in the business world as decision-makers often face an evolving environment where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Ningyuan Chen , Chun Wang , Longlin Wang

We develop asymptotically optimal policies for the multi armed bandit (MAB), problem, under a cost constraint. This model is applicable in situations where each sample (or activation) from a population (bandit) incurs a known bandit…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-18 Apostolos N. Burnetas , Odysseas Kanavetas , Michael N. Katehakis

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 this paper, we study a best arm identification problem with dual objects. In addition to the classic reward, each arm is associated with a cost distribution and the goal is to identify the largest reward arm using the minimum expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Kellen Kanarios , Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

A decision rule is epsilon-minimax if it is minimax up to an additive factor epsilon. We present an algorithm for provably obtaining epsilon-minimax solutions for a class of statistical decision problems. In particular, we are interested in…

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 best arm identification in a federated multi-armed bandit setting with a central server and multiple clients, when each client has access to a {\em subset} of arms and each arm yields independent Gaussian observations. The goal is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Zhirui Chen , P. N. Karthik , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Yeow Meng Chee

This paper studies a multi-armed bandit (MAB) version of the range-searching problem. In its basic form, range searching considers as input a set of points (on the real line) and a collection of (real) intervals. Here, with each specified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Siddharth Barman , Ramakrishnan Krishnamurthy , Saladi Rahul

In the present paper, we derive lower bounds for the risk of the nonparametric empirical Bayes estimators. In order to attain the optimal convergence rate, we propose generalization of the linear empirical Bayes estimation method which…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-06-12 Rida Benhaddou , Marianna Pensky

We consider the Max $K$-Armed Bandit problem, where a learning agent is faced with several stochastic arms, each a source of i.i.d. rewards of unknown distribution. At each time step the agent chooses an arm, and observes the reward of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-25 Yahel David , Nahum Shimkin

The best arm identification problem in the multi-armed bandit setting is an excellent model of many real-world decision-making problems, yet it fails to capture the fact that in the real-world, safety constraints often must be met while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Zhenlin Wang , Andrew Wagenmaker , Kevin Jamieson

We consider a variant of the best arm identification (BAI) problem in multi-armed bandits (MAB) in which there are two sets of arms (source and target), and the objective is to determine the best target arm while only pulling source arms.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Ojash Neopane , Aaditya Ramdas , Aarti Singh

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 study the problem of best arm identification in linearly parameterised multi-armed bandits. Given a set of feature vectors $\mathcal{X}\subset\mathbb{R}^d,$ a confidence parameter $\delta$ and an unknown vector $\theta^*,$ the goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Mohammadi Zaki , Avi Mohan , Aditya Gopalan

We study the initial beam acquisition problem in millimeter wave (mm-wave) networks from the perspective of best arm identification in multi-armed bandits (MABs). For the stationary environment, we propose a novel algorithm called…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Gourab Ghatak

We consider the combinatorial bandits problem with semi-bandit feedback under finite sampling budget constraints, in which the learner can carry out its action only for a limited number of times specified by an overall budget. The action is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Jasmin Brandt , Viktor Bengs , Björn Haddenhorst , Eyke Hüllermeier

We study the Active Simple Hypothesis Testing (ASHT) problem, a simpler variant of the Fixed Budget Best Arm Identification problem. In this work, we provide novel game theoretic formulation of the upper bounds of the ASHT problem. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Sushant Vijayan

In this paper, we study the problem of estimating uniformly well the mean values of several distributions given a finite budget of samples. If the variance of the distributions were known, one could design an optimal sampling strategy by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-17 Alexandra Carpentier , Alessandro Lazaric , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Rémi Munos , Peter Auer , András Antos