SHPRR: An Algorithm for Pure Exploration under Constrained Regret

Georgina Nouli, Flore Sentenac, Maximilian Schiffer

Best Arm Identification (BAI) conventionally measures the cost of experimentation by the number of samples collected. In many operational settings, however, the cost of exploration relative to a trusted baseline already in place is equally important. We study BAI under both a fixed sampling horizon and a regret budget. Unlike generic resources considered in constrained pure exploration, regret has a distinctive structure: sampling better arms is less costly relative to the baseline. We theoretically show that the regret cost of exploration decreases across the phases of Sequential Halving, a widely used pure-exploration algorithm. This observation yields improved guarantees on the probability of identifying the best arm and motivates a more effective allocation of the regret budget. We propose Sequential Halving with Proportional Regret Rationing (SHPRR), which front-loads the regret budget to allow more exploration when many arms remain. Experiments on synthetic and real-world instances show that SHPRR improves best-arm identification performance over uniform regret allocation and existing baselines.