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Related papers: Pure Exploration via Frank-Wolfe Self-Play

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Preference-based Pure Exploration (PrePEx) aims to identify with a given confidence level the set of Pareto optimal arms in a vector-valued (aka multi-objective) bandit, where the reward vectors are ordered via a (given) preference cone…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Udvas Das , Apurv Shukla , Debabrota Basu

The multi-armed bandit(MAB) is a classical sequential decision problem. Most work requires assumptions about the reward distribution (e.g., bounded), while practitioners may have difficulty obtaining information about these distributions to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Han Qi , Fei Guo , Li Zhu

We consider the problem of near-optimal arm identification in the fixed confidence setting of the infinitely armed bandit problem when nothing is known about the arm reservoir distribution. We (1) introduce a PAC-like framework within which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-22 Maryam Aziz , Jesse Anderton , Emilie Kaufmann , Javed Aslam

Multi-player multi-armed bandit is an increasingly relevant decision-making problem, motivated by applications to cognitive radio systems. Most research for this problem focuses exclusively on the settings that players have \textit{full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-14 Guojun Xiong , Jian Li

This paper introduces the framework of multi-armed sampling, which serves as the sampling counterpart to the optimization problem of multi-armed bandits. Our primary motivation is to rigorously examine the exploration-exploitation trade-off…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Mohammad Pedramfar , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

Under the uncoupled learning setup, the last-iterate convergence guarantee towards Nash equilibrium is shown to be impossible in many games. This work studies the last-iterate convergence guarantee in general games toward rationalizability,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Jibang Wu , Haifeng Xu , Fan Yao

Pure exploration is one of the fundamental problems in multi-armed bandits (MAB). However, existing works mostly focus on specific pure exploration tasks, without a holistic view of the general pure exploration problem. This work fills this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Di Wu , Chengshuai Shi , Ruida Zhou , Cong Shen

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

The celebrated multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory models the basic trade-off between exploration, or learning about the state of a system, and exploitation, or utilizing the system. In this paper we study the variant of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2013-06-19 Sudipto Guha , Kamesh Munagala

We propose a simple variant of the generalized Frank-Wolfe method for solving strongly convex composite optimization problems, by introducing an additional averaging step on the dual variables. We show that in this variant, one can choose a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-27 Renbo Zhao , Qiuyun Zhu

We study pure exploration in bandits, where the dimension of the feature representation can be much larger than the number of arms. To overcome the curse of dimensionality, we propose to adaptively embed the feature representation of each…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-18 Yinglun Zhu , Dongruo Zhou , Ruoxi Jiang , Quanquan Gu , Rebecca Willett , Robert Nowak

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

The multi-armed bandit problem forms the foundation for solving a wide range of on-line stochastic optimization problems through a simple, yet effective mechanism. One simply casts the problem as a gambler that repeatedly pulls one out of N…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-08 Sondre Glimsdal , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

We study the pure exploration problem subject to a matroid constraint (Best-Basis) in a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. In a Best-Basis instance, we are given $n$ stochastic arms with unknown reward distributions, as well as a matroid…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-26 Lijie Chen , Anupam Gupta , Jian Li

This paper considers a multi-armed bandit game where the number of arms is much larger than the maximum budget and is effectively infinite. We characterize necessary and sufficient conditions on the total budget for an algorithm to return…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-15 Maryam Aziz , Kevin Jamieson , Javed Aslam

We study the sample complexity of identifying the pure strategy Nash equilibrium (PSNE) in a two-player zero-sum matrix game with noise. Formally, we are given a stochastic model where any learner can sample an entry $(i,j)$ of the input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Arnab Maiti , Ross Boczar , Kevin Jamieson , Lillian J. Ratliff

We study reward maximisation in a wide class of structured stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, where the mean rewards of arms satisfy some given structural constraints, e.g. linear, unimodal, sparse, etc. Our aim is to develop methods…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-03 Rémy Degenne , Han Shao , Wouter M. Koolen

Last-iterate convergence of learning dynamics in games has attracted significant recent attention. In two-player zero-sum games with bandit feedback, where only the loss of the selected action pair is observed, Fiegel et al. (2025) show a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Soumita Hait , Ping Li , Haipeng Luo , Mengxiao Zhang

We propose a new strategy for best-arm identification with fixed confidence of Gaussian variables with bounded means and unit variance. This strategy, called Exploration-Biased Sampling, is not only asymptotically optimal: it is to the best…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-08 Antoine Barrier , Aurélien Garivier , Tomáš Kocák

The combinatorial pure exploration of causal bandits is the following online learning task: given a causal graph with unknown causal inference distributions, in each round we choose a subset of variables to intervene or do no intervention,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Nuoya Xiong , Wei Chen