papersSEP 10 04:00 UTC
Researchers prove gap-entropy conjecture for fixed-confidence best-arm identification
A new arXiv paper in machine learning theory settles the gap-entropy conjecture, an open problem in best-arm identification for multi-armed bandits. The proof covers the fixed-confidence setting with independent unit-variance Gaussian arms, means bounded in [0,1], and a single optimal arm. The result confirms that the entropy of suboptimality gaps governs the sample complexity needed to identify the best arm.