Related papers: Exploration in the Limit
We address the robot grasp optimization problem of unknown objects considering uncertainty in the input space. Grasping unknown objects can be achieved by using a trial and error exploration strategy. Bayesian optimization is a sample…
We study best arm identification in a restless multi-armed bandit setting with finitely many arms. The discrete-time data generated by each arm forms a homogeneous Markov chain taking values in a common, finite state space. The state…
In this paper, we study sequential testing problems with \emph{overlapping} hypotheses. We first focus on the simple problem of assessing if the mean $\mu$ of a Gaussian distribution is smaller or larger than a fixed $\epsilon>0$; if…
Gaussian process (GP) based Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful method for optimizing black-box functions efficiently. The practical performance and theoretical guarantees of this approach depend on having the correct GP hyperparameter…
The paper proposes a novel upper confidence bound (UCB) procedure for identifying the arm with the largest mean in a multi-armed bandit game in the fixed confidence setting using a small number of total samples. The procedure cannot be…
Best arm identification or pure exploration problems have received much attention in the COLT community since Bubeck et al. (2009) and Audibert et al. (2010). For any bandit instance with a unique best arm, its asymptotic complexity in the…
We give a new algorithm for best arm identification in linearly parameterised bandits in the fixed confidence setting. The algorithm generalises the well-known LUCB algorithm of Kalyanakrishnan et al. (2012) by playing an arm which…
The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…
Bayesian adaptive designs enable flexible clinical trials by adapting features based on accumulating data. Among these, Bayesian Response-Adaptive Randomization (BRAR) skews patient allocation towards more promising treatments based on…
Selective classification is a powerful tool for automated decision-making in high-risk scenarios, allowing classifiers to act only when confident and abstain when uncertainty is high. Given a target accuracy, our goal is to minimize…
Sample-average approximations (SAA) are a practical means of finding approximate solutions of stochastic programming problems involving an extremely large (or infinite) number of scenarios. SAA can also be used to find estimates of a lower…
Bayesian optimization is a coherent, ubiquitous approach to decision-making under uncertainty, with applications including multi-arm bandits, active learning, and black-box optimization. Bayesian optimization selects decisions (i.e.…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is increasingly employed in critical applications to find the optimal design with minimal cost. While BO is known for its sample efficiency, relying solely on costly high-fidelity data can still result in high…
Adaptive sampling schemes are well known to create complex dependence that may invalidate conventional inference methods. A recent line of work shows that this need not be the case for UCB-type algorithms in multi-armed bandits. A central…
While experimental design often focuses on selecting the single best alternative from a finite set (e.g., in ranking and selection or best-arm identification), many pure-exploration problems pursue richer goals. Given a specific goal,…
Online controlled experiments have emerged as industry gold standard for assessing new web features. As new web algorithms proliferate, experimentation platform faces an increasing demand on the velocity of online experiments, which…
Constructing tests or confidence regions that control over the error rates in the long-run is probably one of the most important problem in statistics. Yet, the theoretical justification for most methods in statistics is asymptotic. The…
Adjustable hyperparameters of machine learning models typically impact various key trade-offs such as accuracy, fairness, robustness, or inference cost. Our goal in this paper is to find a configuration that adheres to user-specified limits…
In the Best-$K$ identification problem (Best-$K$-Arm), we are given $N$ stochastic bandit arms with unknown reward distributions. Our goal is to identify the $K$ arms with the largest means with high confidence, by drawing samples from the…
We consider a finite-horizon multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in a Bayesian setting, for which we propose an information relaxation sampling framework. With this framework, we define an intuitive family of control policies that include…