Bandit Multiclass PAC Learning: Structural Baselines and a Confidence Direct Sum

arXiv:2609.29694v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How much does high confidence cost when a multiclass learner sees only whether its prediction is correct? We separate two behaviors in realizable bandit PAC learning. An anchored dimension gives a general lower bound that is attained, up to universal constants, by a family of product-block classes. In contrast, for $n\ge16$ divisible by four, an affine multiplexer with bandit DS dimension $2n-1$ has sample complexity $\Theta((n\min\{n,\ln(1/\delta)\}+\ln(1/\delta))/\varepsilon)$ in the standard accuracy and confidence regime. Its lower bound applies to adaptive randomized learners with improper outputs. The obstruction is that evidence collected against one candidate group cannot be reused against the others. The better of two algorithms matches this cost. One finds the correct group through a positive response. The other exhausts the rank of successive groups. The resulting confidence profile rules out a universal additive-confidence bound linear in the bandit DS dimension. Moreover, classes with identical anchored dimension, bandit DS dimension, and pointwise label width can have polynomially different sample complexities. We also sharpen the confidence accounting in ListCascade and show how one positive response replaces the bandit DS dimension by the anchored dimension in a general upper bound.