arXiv Machine Learning

Fundamental Limitations of Fixed-Budget Best-Arm Identification

arXiv:2607. 11635v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In fixed-budget best-arm identification, also known as ranking and selection, an algorithm has a sampling budget to distribute across $K$ arms.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

Fixed Budget is No Harder Than Fixed Confidence in Best-Arm Identification up to Logarithmic Factors

arXiv:2602. 03972v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: 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).

By Kapilan Balagopalan, Yinan Li, Yao Zhao, Tuan Nguyen, Anton Daitche, Houssam Nassif, Kwang-Sung Jun
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

A Complexity Measure for Active Learning in Multi-group Mean Estimation

arXiv:2606. 14690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a \emph{max-risk} objective for active learning in a multi-group mean estimation $d$-armed bandits: a learner adaptively allocates a budget of $T$ samples across $d$ groups to minimize the worst-case uncertainty index $\max_{k\in[d]}\sigma_k^2/n_k$, where $\sigma_k$ is the standard deviation of the distribution of arm $d$, and $n_k$ is the number of times arm $d$ is sampled.

By Abdellah Aznag, Rachel Cummings, Adam N. Elmachtoub
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 9

Is Randomness Necessary for Adaptive Data Analysis?

arXiv:2607. 07085v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Adaptive Data Analysis (ADA) problem formalizes the challenge of preventing false discovery and overfitting when a dataset is repeatedly reused.

By Edith Cohen, Haim Kaplan, Yishay Mansour, Shay Sapir, Uri Stemmer
arXiv AI
Jun 11

The Power of Test-Time Training for Approximate Sampling

arXiv:2606. 11437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiently sampling from a complex probability distribution is a fundamental problem which has become increasingly pertinent in recent years with the rise of generative AI, as sophisticated sampling procedures from LLMs have been proposed to solve challenging reasoning problems.

By Noah Golowich, Ankur Moitra, Dhruv Rohatgi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 9

Best-Arm Identification with Generative Proxy

arXiv:2607. 06879v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Best-arm identification is a canonical model for data-driven decision-making, but in many applications each reward observation is costly.

By Tianyi Ma, Hanzhang Qin, Ruihao Zhu, Jierui Zuo