Adaptive Learning Rate for Follow-the-Regularized-Leader: Competitive Analysis and Best-of-Both-Worlds

Follow-The-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) is known as an effective and versatile approach in online learning, where appropriate choice of the learning rate is crucial for smaller regret. To this end, we formulate the problem of adjusting FTRL's learning rate as a sequential decision-making problem and introduce the framework of competitive analysis. We establish a lower bound for the competitive ratio and propose update rules for learning rate that achieves an upper bound within a constant factor of this lower bound. Specifically, we illustrate that the optimal competitive ratio is characterized by the (approximate) monotonicity of components of the penalty term, showing that a constant competitive ratio is achievable if the components of the penalty term form a monotonically non-increasing sequence, and derive a tight competitive ratio when penalty terms are $\xi$-approximately monotone non-increasing. Our proposed update rule, referred to as \textit{stability-penalty matching}, also facilitates constructing the Best-Of-Both-Worlds (BOBW) algorithms for stochastic and adversarial environments. In these environments our result contributes to achieve tighter regret bound and broaden the applicability of algorithms for various settings such as multi-armed bandits, graph bandits, linear bandits, and contextual bandits.

Fast Rates in Online Convex Optimization by Exploiting the Curvature of Feasible Sets

In this paper, we explore online convex optimization (OCO) and introduce a new analysis that provides fast rates by exploiting the curvature of feasible sets. In online linear optimization, it is known that if the average gradient of loss functions is larger than a certain value, the curvature of feasible sets can be exploited by the follow-the-leader (FTL) algorithm to achieve a logarithmic regret. This paper reveals that algorithms adaptive to the curvature of loss functions can also leverage the curvature of feasible sets. We first prove that if an optimal decision is on the boundary of a feasible set and the gradient of an underlying loss function is non-zero, then the algorithm achieves a regret upper bound of $O(\rho \log T)$ in stochastic environments. Here, $\rho > 0$ is the radius of the smallest sphere that includes the optimal decision and encloses the feasible set. Our approach, unlike existing ones, can work directly with convex loss functions, exploiting the curvature of loss functions simultaneously, and can achieve the logarithmic regret only with a local property of feasible sets. Additionally, it achieves an $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret even in adversarial environments where FTL suffers an $\Omega(T)$ regret, and attains an $O(\rho \log T + \sqrt{C \rho \log T})$ regret bound in corrupted stochastic environments with corruption level $C$. Furthermore, by extending our analysis, we establish a regret upper bound of $O\Big(T^{\frac{q-2}{2(q-1)}} (\log T)^{\frac{q}{2(q-1)}}\Big)$ for $q$-uniformly convex feasible sets, where uniformly convex sets include strongly convex sets and $\ell_p$-balls for $p \in [1,\infty)$. This bound bridges the gap between the $O(\log T)$ regret bound for strongly convex sets ($q=2$) and the $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret bound for non-curved sets ($q\to\infty$).

Online Control of Linear Systems with Unbounded and Degenerate Noise

This paper investigates the problem of controlling a linear system under possibly unbounded and degenerate noise with unknown cost functions, known as an online control problem. In contrast to the existing work, which assumes the boundedness of noise, we reveal that for convex costs, an $ \widetilde{O}(\sqrt{T}) $ regret bound can be achieved even for unbounded noise, where $ T $ denotes the time horizon. Moreover, when the costs are strongly convex, we establish an $ O({\rm poly} (\log T)) $ regret bound without the assumption that noise covariance is non-degenerate, which has been required in the literature. The key ingredient in removing the rank assumption on noise is a system transformation associated with the noise covariance. This simultaneously enables the parameter reduction of an online control algorithm.

Exploration by Optimization with Hybrid Regularizers: Logarithmic Regret with Adversarial Robustness in Partial Monitoring

Partial monitoring is a generic framework of online decision-making problems with limited observations. To make decisions from such limited observations, it is necessary to find an appropriate distribution for exploration. Recently, a powerful approach for this purpose, exploration by optimization (ExO), was proposed, which achieves the optimal bounds in adversarial environments with follow-the-regularized-leader for a wide range of online decision-making problems. However, a naive application of ExO in stochastic environments significantly degrades regret bounds. To resolve this problem in locally observable games, we first establish a novel framework and analysis for ExO with a hybrid regularizer. This development allows us to significantly improve the existing regret bounds of best-of-both-worlds (BOBW) algorithms, which achieves nearly optimal bounds both in stochastic and adversarial environments. In particular, we derive a stochastic regret bound of $O(\sum_{a \neq a^*} k^2 m^2 \log T / \Delta_a)$, where $k$, $m$, and $T$ are the numbers of actions, observations and rounds, $a^*$ is an optimal action, and $\Delta_a$ is the suboptimality gap for action $a$. This bound is roughly $\Theta(k^2 \log T)$ times smaller than existing BOBW bounds. In addition, for globally observable games, we provide a new BOBW algorithm with the first $O(\log T)$ stochastic bound.

Online Structured Prediction with Fenchel--Young Losses and Improved Surrogate Regret for Online Multiclass Classification with Logistic Loss

This paper studies online structured prediction with full-information feedback. For online multiclass classification, van der Hoeven (2020) has obtained surrogate regret bounds independent of the time horizon, or \emph{finite}, by introducing an elegant \emph{exploit-the-surrogate-gap} framework. However, this framework has been limited to multiclass classification primarily because it relies on a classification-specific procedure for converting estimated scores to outputs. We extend the exploit-the-surrogate-gap framework to online structured prediction with \emph{Fenchel--Young losses}, a large family of surrogate losses including the logistic loss for multiclass classification, obtaining finite surrogate regret bounds in various structured prediction problems. To this end, we propose and analyze \emph{randomized decoding}, which converts estimated scores to general structured outputs. Moreover, by applying our decoding to online multiclass classification with the logistic loss, we obtain a surrogate regret bound of $O(B^2)$, where $B$ is the $\ell_2$-diameter of the domain. This bound is tight up to logarithmic factors and improves the previous bound of $O(dB^2)$ due to van der Hoeven (2020) by a factor of $d$, the number of classes.

Best-of-Both-Worlds Algorithms for Linear Contextual Bandits

We study best-of-both-worlds algorithms for $K$-armed linear contextual bandits. Our algorithms deliver near-optimal regret bounds in both the adversarial and stochastic regimes, without prior knowledge about the environment. In the stochastic regime, we achieve the polylogarithmic rate $\frac{(dK)^2\mathrm{poly}\log(dKT)}{\Delta_{\min}}$, where $\Delta_{\min}$ is the minimum suboptimality gap over the $d$-dimensional context space. In the adversarial regime, we obtain either the first-order $\widetilde{O}(dK\sqrt{L^*})$ bound, or the second-order $\widetilde{O}(dK\sqrt{\Lambda^*})$ bound, where $L^*$ is the cumulative loss of the best action and $\Lambda^*$ is a notion of the cumulative second moment for the losses incurred by the algorithm. Moreover, we develop an algorithm based on FTRL with Shannon entropy regularizer that does not require the knowledge of the inverse of the covariance matrix, and achieves a polylogarithmic regret in the stochastic regime while obtaining $\widetilde{O}\big(dK\sqrt{T}\big)$ regret bounds in the adversarial regime.

Stability-penalty-adaptive Follow-the-regularized-leader: Sparsity, Game-dependency, and Best-of-both-worlds

Adaptivity to the difficulties of a problem is a key property in sequential decision-making problems to broaden the applicability of algorithms. Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) has recently emerged as one of the most promising approaches for obtaining various types of adaptivity in bandit problems. Aiming to further generalize this adaptivity, we develop a generic adaptive learning rate, called Stability-Penalty-Adaptive (SPA) learning rate for FTRL. This learning rate yields a regret bound jointly depending on stability and penalty of the algorithm, into which the regret of FTRL is typically decomposed. With this result, we establish several algorithms with three types of adaptivity: sparsity, game-dependency, and Best-of-Both-Worlds (BOBW). Sparsity frequently appears in real-world problems. However, existing sparse multi-armed bandit algorithms with $k$-arms assume that the sparsity level $s \leq k$ is known in advance, which is often not the case in real-world scenarios. To address this problem, with the help of the new learning rate framework, we establish $s$-agnostic algorithms with regret bounds of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{sT})$ in the adversarial regime for $T$ rounds, which matches the existing lower bound up to a logarithmic factor. Meanwhile, BOBW algorithms aim to achieve a near-optimal regret in both the stochastic and adversarial regimes. Leveraging the new adaptive learning rate framework and a novel analysis to bound the variation in FTRL output in response to changes in a regularizer, we establish the first BOBW algorithm with a sparsity-dependent bound. Additionally, we explore partial monitoring and demonstrate that the proposed learning rate framework allows us to achieve a game-dependent bound and the BOBW simultaneously.

Best-of-Both-Worlds Algorithms for Partial Monitoring

This paper considers the partial monitoring problem with $k$-actions and $d$-outcomes and provides the first best-of-both-worlds algorithms, whose regrets are bounded poly-logarithmically in the stochastic regime and near-optimally in the adversarial regime. To be more specific, we show that for non-degenerate locally observable games, the regret in the stochastic regime is bounded by $O(k^3 m^2 \log(T) \log(k_{\Pi} T) / \Delta_{\mathrm{\min}})$ and in the adversarial regime by $O(k^{2/3} m \sqrt{T \log(T) \log k_{\Pi}})$, where $T$ is the number of rounds, $m$ is the maximum number of distinct observations per action, $\Delta_{\min}$ is the minimum optimality gap, and $k_{\Pi}$ is the number of Pareto optimal actions. Moreover, we show that for non-degenerate globally observable games, the regret in the stochastic regime is bounded by $O(\max\{c_{\mathcal{G}}^2 / k,\, c_{\mathcal{G}}\} \log(T) \log(k_{\Pi} T) / \Delta_{\min}^2)$ and in the adversarial regime by $O((\max\{c_{\mathcal{G}}^2 / k,\, c_{\mathcal{G}}\} \log(T) \log(k_{\Pi} T)))^{1/3} T^{2/3})$, where $c_{\mathcal{G}}$ is a game-dependent constant. Our algorithms are based on the follow-the-regularized-leader framework that takes into account the nature of the partial monitoring problem, inspired by algorithms in the field of online learning with feedback graphs.

Adversarially Robust Multi-Armed Bandit Algorithm with Variance-Dependent Regret Bounds

This paper considers the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem and provides a new best-of-both-worlds (BOBW) algorithm that works nearly optimally in both stochastic and adversarial settings. In stochastic settings, some existing BOBW algorithms achieve tight gap-dependent regret bounds of $O(\sum_{i: \Delta_i>0} \frac{\log T}{\Delta_i})$ for suboptimality gap $\Delta_i$ of arm $i$ and time horizon $T$. As Audibert et al. [2007] have shown, however, that the performance can be improved in stochastic environments with low-variance arms. In fact, they have provided a stochastic MAB algorithm with gap-variance-dependent regret bounds of $O(\sum_{i: \Delta_i>0} (\frac{\sigma_i^2}{\Delta_i} + 1) \log T )$ for loss variance $\sigma_i^2$ of arm $i$. In this paper, we propose the first BOBW algorithm with gap-variance-dependent bounds, showing that the variance information can be used even in the possibly adversarial environment. Further, the leading constant factor in our gap-variance dependent bound is only (almost) twice the value for the lower bound. Additionally, the proposed algorithm enjoys multiple data-dependent regret bounds in adversarial settings and works well in stochastic settings with adversarial corruptions. The proposed algorithm is based on the follow-the-regularized-leader method and employs adaptive learning rates that depend on the empirical prediction error of the loss, which leads to gap-variance-dependent regret bounds reflecting the variance of the arms.

Globally Optimal Algorithms for Fixed-Budget Best Arm Identification

We consider the fixed-budget best arm identification problem where the goal is to find the arm of the largest mean with a fixed number of samples. It is known that the probability of misidentifying the best arm is exponentially small to the number of rounds. However, limited characterizations have been discussed on the rate (exponent) of this value. In this paper, we characterize the optimal rate as a result of global optimization over all possible parameters. We introduce two rates, $R^{\mathrm{go}}$ and $R^{\mathrm{go}}_{\infty}$, corresponding to lower bounds on the misidentification probability, each of which is associated with a proposed algorithm. The rate $R^{\mathrm{go}}$ is associated with $R^{\mathrm{go}}$-tracking, which can be efficiently implemented by a neural network and is shown to outperform existing algorithms. However, this rate requires a nontrivial condition to be achievable. To deal with this issue, we introduce the second rate $R^{\mathrm{go}}_\infty$. We show that this rate is indeed achievable by introducing a conceptual algorithm called delayed optimal tracking (DOT).