Pure Exploration Beyond Reward Feedback: The Role of Post-Action Context

Abstract

We introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with post-action context, a new BAI problem in a stochastic multi-armed bandit environment and the fixed-confidence setting. The problem addresses the scenarios in which the learner receives a post-action context in addition to the reward after playing each action. This post-action context provides additional information that can significantly facilitate the decision process. We analyze two different types of the post-action context: (i) separator, where the reward depends solely on the context, and (ii) non-separator, where the reward depends on both the action and the context. For both cases, we derive instance-dependent lower bounds on the sample complexity and propose algorithms that asymptotically achieve the optimal sample complexity. For the separator setting, we propose a novel sampling rule called G-tracking, which uses the geometry of the context space to directly track the contexts rather than the actions. For the non-separator setting, we do so by demonstrating that the Track-and-Stop algorithm can be extended to this setting. Moreover, in both settings, we theoretically and empirically show that algorithms that ignore the post-action context are sub-optimal. Finally, our empirical results showcase the advantage of our approaches compared to the state of the art.