Collaborative Learning with Limited Interaction: Tight Bounds for Distributed Exploration in Multi-Armed Bandits

Abstract

Best arm identification (or, pure exploration) in multi-armed bandits is a fundamental problem in machine learning. In this paper we study the distributed version of this problem where we have multiple agents, and they want to learn the best arm collaboratively. We want to quantify the power of collaboration under limited interaction (or, communication steps), as interaction is expensive in many settings. We measure the running time of a distributed algorithm as the speedup over the best centralized algorithm where there is only one agent. We give almost tight round-speedup tradeoffs for this problem, along which we develop several new techniques for proving lower bounds on the number of communication steps under time or confidence constraints.