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A Refined Generalization Analysis for Extreme Multi-class Supervised Contrastive Representation Learning Ensemble Distributionally Robust Bayesian Optimisation The Proxy Presumption: From Semantic Embeddings to Valid Social Measures Modulated learning for private and distributed regression with just a single sample per client device Query-efficient model evaluation using cached responses Functional-prior-based approaches to Bayesian PDE-constrained inversion using physics-informed neural networks Optimal Experiments for Partial Causal Effect Identification Order-Agnostic Autoregressive Modelling with Missing Data Grokking or Glitching? How Low-Precision Drives Slingshot Loss Spikes Tuning Derivatives for Causal Fairness in Machine Learning Spherical Flows for Sampling Categorical Data Bayesian Rain Field Reconstruction using Commercial Microwave Links and Diffusion Model Priors GRALIS: A Unified Canonical Framework for Linear Attribution Methods via Riesz Representation Sharp Capacity Thresholds in Linear Associative Memory: From Winner-Take-All to Listwise Retrieval Unified Framework of Distributional Regret in Multi-Armed Bandits and Reinforcement Learning Jacobian-Velocity Bounds for Deployment Risk Under Covariate Drift Self-Attention as Transport: Limits of Symmetric Spectral Diagnostics Perturbation is All You Need for Extrapolating Language Models Adapt or Forget: Provable Tradeoffs Between Adam and SGD in Nonstationary Optimization Realizable Bayes-Consistency for General Metric Losses Graph Convolutional Support Vector Regression for Robust Spatiotemporal Forecasting of Urban Air Pollution Segmenting Human-LLM Co-authored Text via Change Point Detection Stochastic Schrödinger Diffusion Models for Pure-State Ensemble Generation Understanding Self-Supervised Learning via Latent Distribution Matching The Geometric Mechanics of Contrastive Representation Learning: Alignment Potentials, Entropic Dispersion, and Cross-modal Divergence Imbalanced Classification under Capacity Constraints On the Spectral Structure and Objective Equivalence of Orthogonal Multilabel Fisher Discriminants Partially Observed Structural Causal Models First-Order Efficiency for Probabilistic Value Estimation via A Statistical Viewpoint Robust and Fast Training via Per-Sample Clipping
UCB for Large-Scale Pure Exploration: Beyond Sub-Gaussianity
[Submitted on 27 Nov 2025 (v1), last revised 27 Aug 2026 (this v · 2025-11-27 · via stat updates on arXiv.org

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Abstract:Selecting the best alternative from a finite set is the central objective of ranking and selection (R&S) and best arm identification (BAI). Traditional R&S or BAI approaches have predominantly relied on Gaussian or sub-Gaussian assumptions on the performance distributions of all alternatives, which limit their applicability to non-sub-Gaussian---especially heavy-tailed---problems. The need to move beyond sub-Gaussianity may become even more critical in large-scale problems, which tend to be especially sensitive to distributional specifications. In this paper, motivated by the widespread use of upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms in sequential decision making, we investigate their performance in large-scale, non-sub-Gaussian R&S settings. We consider the simplest category of UCB algorithms, where the UCB value for each alternative is defined as the sample mean plus an exploration bonus that depends only on its own sample size. We abstract this into a meta-UCB algorithm and propose letting it select the alternative with the largest sample size as the best upon stopping. For this meta-UCB algorithm, we first derive a distribution-free lower bound on the probability of correct selection. Building on this bound, we first study the indifference-zone formulation and show that the meta-UCB algorithm---and therefore a broad class of UCB algorithms---achieves sample optimality as long as the variances are uniformly bounded. We then extend sample optimality to a non-indifference-zone configuration with polynomially shrinking mean gaps under the same variance assumption. These results demonstrate the applicability of UCB algorithms to large-scale R&S problems with non-sub-Gaussian distributions. Numerical experiments support our results and provide additional insights into the comparative behaviors of UCB algorithms within and beyond our meta-UCB framework.

Submission history

From: Zaile Li [view email]
[v1] Thu, 27 Nov 2025 09:54:22 UTC (327 KB)
[v2] Thu, 27 Aug 2026 15:29:28 UTC (253 KB)