Generic Exploration and K-armed Voting Bandits

We study a stochastic online learning scheme with partial feedback where the utility of decisions is only observable through an estimation of the environment parameters. We propose a generic pure-exploration algorithm, able to cope with various utility functions from multi-armed bandits settings to dueling bandits. The primary application of this setting is to offer a natural generalization of dueling bandits for situations where the environment parameters reflect the idiosyncratic preferences of a mixed crowd.