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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

We study the problem of best-arm identification (BAI) in the fixed-budget setting with heterogeneous reward variances. We propose two variance-adaptive BAI algorithms for this setting: SHVar for known reward variances and SHAdaVar for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Anusha Lalitha , Kousha Kalantari , Yifei Ma , Anoop Deoras , Branislav Kveton

This paper introduces a general framework for risk-sensitive bandits that integrates the notions of risk-sensitive objectives by adopting a rich class of distortion riskmetrics. The introduced framework subsumes the various existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-13 Meltem Tatlı , Arpan Mukherjee , Prashanth L. A. , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Ali Tajer

We consider a constrained, pure exploration, stochastic multi-armed bandit formulation under a fixed budget. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution and is described by multiple attributes that are a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Fathima Zarin Faizal , Jayakrishnan Nair

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 develop a frequentist decision-theoretic framework for selecting the best arm in one-shot, multi-arm randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Our approach characterizes the minimax-regret (MMR) optimal decision rule for any multivariate…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-10-21 Joonhwi Joo

Motivated by a natural problem in online model selection with bandit information, we introduce and analyze a best arm identification problem in the rested bandit setting, wherein arm expected losses decrease with the number of times the arm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-08 Leonardo Cella , Claudio Gentile , Massimiliano Pontil

This paper studies the problem of adaptively sampling from K distributions (arms) in order to identify the largest gap between any two adjacent means. We call this the MaxGap-bandit problem. This problem arises naturally in approximate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-04 Sumeet Katariya , Ardhendu Tripathy , Robert Nowak

When an experimenter has the option of running an adaptive trial, is it admissible to ignore this option and run a non-adaptive trial instead? We provide a negative answer to this question in the best-arm identification problem, where the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-06 Guido Imbens , Chao Qin , Stefan Wager

We address the problem of finding the maximizer of a nonlinear smooth function, that can only be evaluated point-wise, subject to constraints on the number of permitted function evaluations. This problem is also known as fixed-budget best…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-11-12 Matthew W. Hoffman , Bobak Shahriari , Nando de Freitas

Practitioners conducting adaptive experiments often encounter two competing priorities: maximizing total welfare (or `reward') through effective treatment assignment and swiftly concluding experiments to implement population-wide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Chao Qin , Daniel Russo

We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. Given a set of $n$ arms indexed from $1$ to $n$, each arm $i$ is associated with an unknown reward distribution supported on $[0,1]$ with mean…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Pinyan Lu , Chao Tao , Xiaojin Zhang

We study the best arm identification (BAI) problem with potentially biased offline data in the fixed confidence setting, which commonly arises in real-world scenarios such as clinical trials. We prove an impossibility result for adaptive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Le Yang , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Wang Chi Cheung

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

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

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

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 study the problem of the identification of m arms with largest means under a fixed error rate $\delta$ (fixed-confidence Top-m identification), for misspecified linear bandit models. This problem is motivated by practical applications,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Clémence Réda , Andrea Tirinzoni , Rémy Degenne

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 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