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We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Kota Srinivas Reddy , P. N. Karthik , Nikhil Karamchandani , Jayakrishnan Nair

Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) formulations usually make certain assumptions about the underlying arms' distributions, such as bounds on the support or their tail behaviour. Moreover, such parametric information is usually 'baked'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Anmol Kagrecha , Jayakrishnan Nair , Krishna Jagannathan

This paper focuses on selecting the arm with the highest variance from a set of $K$ independent arms. Specifically, we focus on two settings: (i) misallocation minimization setting, that penalizes the number of pulls of suboptimal arms in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Sabrina Khurshid , Gourab Ghatak , Mohammad Shahid Abdulla

This paper presents a comprehensive study on the problem of Best Arm Retention (BAR), which has recently found applications in streaming algorithms for multi-armed bandits. In the BAR problem, the goal is to retain $m$ arms with the best…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Houshuang Chen , Yuchen He , Chihao Zhang

We consider a decision maker allocating one unit of renewable and divisible resource in each period on a number of arms. The arms have unknown and random rewards whose means are proportional to the allocated resource and whose variances are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Ningyuan Chen , Wenhao Li

We address the problem of identifying the optimal policy with a fixed confidence level in a multi-armed bandit setup, when \emph{the arms are subject to linear constraints}. Unlike the standard best-arm identification problem which is well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Emil Carlsson , Debabrota Basu , Fredrik D. Johansson , Devdatt Dubhashi

We study exploration in stochastic multi-armed bandits when we have access to a divisible resource that can be allocated in varying amounts to arm pulls. We focus in particular on the allocation of distributed computing resources, where we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Brijen Thananjeyan , Kirthevasan Kandasamy , Ion Stoica , Michael I. Jordan , Ken Goldberg , Joseph E. Gonzalez

We consider the problem of sequentially allocating resources in a censored semi-bandits setup, where the learner allocates resources at each step to the arms and observes loss. The loss depends on two hidden parameters, one specific to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Arun Verma , Manjesh K. Hanawal , Arun Rajkumar , Raman Sankaran

In multi-objective decision-making with hierarchical preferences, lexicographic bandits provide a natural framework for optimizing multiple objectives in a prioritized order. In this setting, a learner repeatedly selects arms and observes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Bo Xue , Yuanyu Wan , Zhichao Lu , Qingfu Zhang

We consider a variant of the best arm identification task in stochastic multi-armed bandits. Motivated by risk-averse decision-making problems, our goal is to identify a set of $m$ arms with the highest $\tau$-quantile values within a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Mengyan Zhang , Cheng Soon Ong

We address the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with a fixed budget for two-armed Gaussian bandits. In BAI, given multiple arms, we aim to find the best arm, an arm with the highest expected reward, through an adaptive experiment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Masahiro Kato

We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed confidence in stochastic linear bandits. The objective is to identify the best arm with a given level of certainty while minimizing the sampling budget. We devise a simple algorithm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-30 Yassir Jedra , Alexandre Proutiere

We study fixed budget constrained best-arm identification in grouped bandits, where each arm consists of multiple independent attributes with stochastic rewards. An arm is considered feasible only if all its attributes' means are above a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Raunak Mukherjee , Sharayu Moharir

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

Active learning methods have shown great promise in reducing the number of samples necessary for learning. As automated learning systems are adopted into real-time, real-world decision-making pipelines, it is increasingly important that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Romain Camilleri , Andrew Wagenmaker , Jamie Morgenstern , Lalit Jain , Kevin Jamieson

We consider the fixed-budget best arm identification problem where the goal is to find the arm of the largest mean with a fixed number of samples. It is known that the probability of misidentifying the best arm is exponentially small to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-28 Junpei Komiyama , Taira Tsuchiya , Junya Honda

Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret. This innovative variant of the multi-armed bandit problem elegantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-30 Junwen Yang , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Tianyuan Jin

Fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) is a bandit problem where the agent maximizes the probability of identifying the optimal arm within a fixed budget of observations. In this work, we study this problem in the Bayesian setting. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Alexia Atsidakou , Sumeet Katariya , Sujay Sanghavi , Branislav Kveton

In bandit best-arm identification, an algorithm is tasked with finding the arm with highest mean reward with a specified accuracy as fast as possible. We study multi-fidelity best-arm identification, in which the algorithm can choose to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Riccardo Poiani , Rémy Degenne , Emilie Kaufmann , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

This paper considers the optimal adaptive allocation of measurement effort for identifying the best among a finite set of options or designs. An experimenter sequentially chooses designs to measure and observes noisy signals of their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-11 Daniel Russo