TY - GEN
T1 - A Fast Algorithm for PAC Combinatorial Pure Exploration
AU - Ben-David, Noa
AU - Sabato, Sivan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2022, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
PY - 2022/6/30
Y1 - 2022/6/30
N2 - We consider the problem of Combinatorial Pure Exploration (CPE), which deals with finding a combinatorial set of arms with a high reward, when the rewards of individual arms are unknown in advance and must be estimated using arm pulls. Previous algorithms for this problem, while obtaining sample complexity reductions in many cases, are highly computationally intensive, thus making them impractical even for mildly large problems. In this work, we propose a new CPE algorithm in the PAC setting, which is computationally light weight, and so can easily be applied to problems with tens of thousands of arms. This is achieved since the proposed algorithm requires a very small number of combinatorial oracle calls. The algorithm is based on successive acceptance of arms, along with elimination which is based on the combinatorial structure of the problem. We provide sample complexity guarantees for our algorithm, and demonstrate in experiments its usefulness on large problems, whereas previous algorithms are impractical to run on problems of even a few dozen arms. The code is provided at https://github.com/noabdavid/csale. The full version of this paper is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04197.
AB - We consider the problem of Combinatorial Pure Exploration (CPE), which deals with finding a combinatorial set of arms with a high reward, when the rewards of individual arms are unknown in advance and must be estimated using arm pulls. Previous algorithms for this problem, while obtaining sample complexity reductions in many cases, are highly computationally intensive, thus making them impractical even for mildly large problems. In this work, we propose a new CPE algorithm in the PAC setting, which is computationally light weight, and so can easily be applied to problems with tens of thousands of arms. This is achieved since the proposed algorithm requires a very small number of combinatorial oracle calls. The algorithm is based on successive acceptance of arms, along with elimination which is based on the combinatorial structure of the problem. We provide sample complexity guarantees for our algorithm, and demonstrate in experiments its usefulness on large problems, whereas previous algorithms are impractical to run on problems of even a few dozen arms. The code is provided at https://github.com/noabdavid/csale. The full version of this paper is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04197.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85147736212&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85147736212
T3 - Proceedings of the 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2022
SP - 6064
EP - 6071
BT - AAAI-22 Technical Tracks 6
PB - Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
T2 - 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2022
Y2 - 22 February 2022 through 1 March 2022
ER -