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Related papers: Local Asymptotic Normality for Multi-Armed Bandits

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We consider a novel multi-armed bandit framework where the rewards obtained by pulling the arms are functions of a common latent random variable. The correlation between arms due to the common random source can be used to design a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-31 Samarth Gupta , Gauri Joshi , Osman Yağan

We consider a finite-armed structured bandit problem in which mean rewards of different arms are known functions of a common hidden parameter $\theta^*$. Since we do not place any restrictions of these functions, the problem setting…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-04 Samarth Gupta , Shreyas Chaudhari , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Gauri Joshi , Osman Yağan

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

It is well known that in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB), the sample mean of an arm is typically not an unbiased estimator of its true mean. In this paper, we decouple three different sources of this selection bias: adaptive…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-10-29 Jaehyeok Shin , Aaditya Ramdas , Alessandro Rinaldo

This paper studies the problem of finding an anomalous arm in a multi-armed bandit when (a) each arm is a finite-state Markov process, and (b) the arms are restless. Here, anomaly means that the transition probability matrix (TPM) of one of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-02 P. N. Karthik , Rajesh Sundaresan

A latent bandit problem is one in which the learning agent knows the arm reward distributions conditioned on an unknown discrete latent state. The primary goal of the agent is to identify the latent state, after which it can act optimally.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Joey Hong , Branislav Kveton , Manzil Zaheer , Yinlam Chow , Amr Ahmed , Craig Boutilier

We consider a multi-armed bandit setting with finitely many arms, in which each arm yields an $M$-dimensional vector reward upon selection. We assume that the reward of each dimension (a.k.a. {\em objective}) is generated independently of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Zhirui Chen , P. N. Karthik , Yeow Meng Chee , Vincent Y. F. Tan

We give nearly-tight upper and lower bounds for the improving multi-armed bandits problem. An instance of this problem has $k$ arms, each of whose reward function is a concave and increasing function of the number of times that arm has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Avrim Blum , Kavya Ravichandran

We consider the problem of best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit model, under fixed confidence. Given a confidence input $\delta$, the goal is to identify the arm with the highest mean reward with a probability of at least 1 --…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-21 El Mehdi Saad , Gilles Blanchard , Nicolas Verzelen

In this paper we investigate the problem of stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) in the (local) differential privacy (DP/LDP) model. Unlike previous results that assume bounded/sub-Gaussian reward distributions, we focus on the setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Youming Tao , Yulian Wu , Peng Zhao , Di Wang

We consider the problem of identifying the best arm in stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs) using a fixed sampling budget. Characterizing the minimal instance-specific error probability for this problem constitutes one of the important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Po-An Wang , Ruo-Chun Tzeng , Alexandre Proutiere

The stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a common model for sequential decision problems. In the standard setup, a decision maker has to choose at every instant between several competing arms, each of them provides a scalar random…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-27 Asaf Cassel , Shie Mannor , Assaf Zeevi

We study pure exploration with infinitely many bandit arms generated i.i.d. from an unknown distribution. Our goal is to efficiently select a single high quality arm whose average reward is, with probability $1-\delta$, within $\varepsilon$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Xiao-Yue Gong , Mark Sellke

As bandit algorithms are increasingly utilized in scientific studies and industrial applications, there is an associated increasing need for reliable inference methods based on the resulting adaptively-collected data. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-12 Kelly W. Zhang , Lucas Janson , Susan A. Murphy

We study the problem of $K$-armed bandits with reward distributions belonging to a one-parameter exponential distribution family. In the literature, several criteria have been proposed to evaluate the performance of such algorithms,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Hao Qin , Kwang-Sung Jun , Chicheng Zhang

We prove the local asymptotic mixed normality (LAMN) property for a family of probability measures defined by parametrized diffusion processes with nonsynchronous observations. We assume that observation times of processes are independent…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-09-21 Teppei Ogihara

M-estimators are ubiquitous in machine learning and statistical learning theory. They are used both for defining prediction strategies and for evaluating their precision. In this paper, we propose the first non-asymptotic "any-time"…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-05-27 Victor-Emmanuel Brunel , Arnak S. Dalalyan , Nicolas Schreuder

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classic example of the exploration-exploitation dilemma. It is concerned with maximising the total rewards for a gambler by sequentially pulling an arm from a multi-armed slot machine where each arm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-16 Xue Lu , Niall Adams , Nikolas Kantas

Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-04 Shipra Agrawal , Navin Goyal

Best-arm identification (BAI) in a fixed-budget setting is a bandit problem where the learning agent maximizes the probability of identifying the optimal (best) arm after a fixed number of observations. Most works on this topic study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Mohammad Javad Azizi , Branislav Kveton , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh