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Related papers: Exploration in the Limit

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The best-arm identification (BAI) problem is one of the most fundamental problems in interactive machine learning, which has two flavors: the fixed-budget setting (FB) and the fixed-confidence setting (FC). For $K$-armed bandits with the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-20 Kapilan Balagopalan , Yinan Li , Yao Zhao , Tuan Nguyen , Anton Daitche , Houssam Nassif , Kwang-Sung Jun

This paper targets a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem called good arm identification (GAI). GAI is a pure-exploration bandit problem with the goal to output as many good arms using as few samples as possible, where a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Yun-Da Tsai , Tzu-Hsien Tsai , Shou-De Lin

This study investigates the contextual best arm identification (BAI) problem, aiming to design an adaptive experiment to identify the best treatment arm conditioned on contextual information (covariates). We consider a decision-maker who…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Masahiro Kato , Kyohei Okumura , Takuya Ishihara , Toru Kitagawa

We study the robust best-arm identification problem (RBAI) in the case of linear rewards. The primary objective is to identify a near-optimal robust arm, which involves selecting arms at every round and assessing their robustness by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Wei Wang , Sattar Vakili , Ilija Bogunovic

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 fixed budget bandit identification, an algorithm sequentially observes samples from several distributions up to a given final time. It then answers a query about the set of distributions. A good algorithm will have a small probability of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-03 Rémy Degenne

We consider the problem of identifying the best arm in a multi-armed bandit model. Despite a wealth of literature in the traditional fixed budget and fixed confidence regimes of the best arm identification problem, it still remains a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-08 Michael O. Harding , Kirthevasan Kandasamy

In this paper, we introduce the constrained best mixed arm identification (CBMAI) problem with a fixed budget. This is a pure exploration problem in a stochastic finite armed bandit model. Each arm is associated with a reward and multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Dengwang Tang , Rahul Jain , Ashutosh Nayyar , Pierluigi Nuzzo

We propose EB-TC$\varepsilon$, a novel sampling rule for $\varepsilon$-best arm identification in stochastic bandits. It is the first instance of Top Two algorithm analyzed for approximate best arm identification. EB-TC$\varepsilon$ is an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-07 Marc Jourdan , Rémy Degenne , Emilie Kaufmann

The knowledge gradient (KG) algorithm is a popular and effective algorithm for the best arm identification (BAI) problem. Due to the complex calculation of KG, theoretical analysis of this algorithm is difficult, and existing results are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-23 Yanwen Li , Siyang Gao

Motivated by the task of hyperparameter optimization, we introduce the non-stochastic best-arm identification problem. Within the multi-armed bandit literature, the cumulative regret objective enjoys algorithms and analyses for both the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-02 Kevin Jamieson , Ameet Talwalkar

Within a Bayesian decision theoretic framework we investigate some asymptotic optimality properties of a large class of multiple testing rules. A parametric setup is considered, in which observations come from a normal scale mixture model…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-11-22 Małgorzata Bogdan , Arijit Chakrabarti , Florian Frommlet , Jayanta K. Ghosh

This paper considers a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem with dual objectives: (i) quick identification and commitment to the optimal arm, and (ii) reward maximization throughout a sequence of $T$ consecutive rounds. Though each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

We introduce the safe best-arm identification framework with linear feedback, where the agent is subject to some stage-wise safety constraint that linearly depends on an unknown parameter vector. The agent must take actions in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-19 Xuedong Shang , Igor Colin , Merwan Barlier , Hamza Cherkaoui

This paper studies two variants of the best arm identification (BAI) problem under the streaming model, where we have a stream of $n$ arms with reward distributions supported on $[0,1]$ with unknown means. The arms in the stream are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Tianyuan Jin , Keke Huang , Jing Tang , Xiaokui Xiao

In pure-exploration problems, information is gathered sequentially to answer a question on the stochastic environment. While best-arm identification for linear bandits has been extensively studied in recent years, few works have been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-10 Marc Jourdan , Rémy Degenne

This work investigates the problem of best arm identification for multi-agent multi-armed bandits. We consider $N$ agents grouped into $M$ clusters, where each cluster solves a stochastic bandit problem. The mapping between agents and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Yash , Nikhil Karamchandani , Avishek Ghosh

Good arm identification (GAI) is a pure-exploration bandit problem in which a single learner outputs an arm as soon as it is identified as a good arm. A good arm is defined as an arm with an expected reward greater than or equal to a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Tzu-Hsien Tsai , Yun-Da Tsai , Shou-De Lin

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

We focus on the problem of best-arm identification in a stochastic multi-arm bandit with temporally decreasing variances for the arms' rewards. We model arm rewards as Gaussian random variables with fixed means and variances that decrease…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Tamojeet Roychowdhury , Kota Srinivas Reddy , Krishna P Jagannathan , Sharayu Moharir