No Arabic abstract
Some of the most compelling applications of online convex optimization, including online prediction and classification, are unconstrained: the natural feasible set is R^n. Existing algorithms fail to achieve sub-linear regret in this setting unless constraints on the comparator point x^* are known in advance. We present algorithms that, without such prior knowledge, offer near-optimal regret bounds with respect to any choice of x^*. In particular, regret with respect to x^* = 0 is constant. We then prove lower bounds showing that our guarantees are near-optimal in this setting.
In this paper, we consider the time-varying Bayesian optimization problem. The unknown function at each time is assumed to lie in an RKHS (reproducing kernel Hilbert space) with a bounded norm. We adopt the general variation budget model to capture the time-varying environment, and the variation is characterized by the change of the RKHS norm. We adapt the restart and sliding window mechanism to introduce two GP-UCB type algorithms: R-GP-UCB and SW-GP-UCB, respectively. We derive the first (frequentist) regret guarantee on the dynamic regret for both algorithms. Our results not only recover previous linear bandit results when a linear kernel is used, but complement the previous regret analysis of time-varying Gaussian process bandit under a Bayesian-type regularity assumption, i.e., each function is a sample from a Gaussian process.
We consider multi-objective optimization (MOO) of an unknown vector-valued function in the non-parametric Bayesian optimization (BO) setting, with the aim being to learn points on the Pareto front of the objectives. Most existing BO algorithms do not model the fact that the multiple objectives, or equivalently, tasks can share similarities, and even the few that do lack rigorous, finite-time regret guarantees that capture explicitly inter-task structure. In this work, we address this problem by modelling inter-task dependencies using a multi-task kernel and develop two novel BO algorithms based on random scalarizations of the objectives. Our algorithms employ vector-valued kernel regression as a stepping stone and belong to the upper confidence bound class of algorithms. Under a smoothness assumption that the unknown vector-valued function is an element of the reproducing kernel Hilbert space associated with the multi-task kernel, we derive worst-case regret bounds for our algorithms that explicitly capture the similarities between tasks. We numerically benchmark our algorithms on both synthetic and real-life MOO problems, and show the advantages offered by learning with multi-task kernels.
In this paper, we consider the problem of distributed online convex optimization, where a group of agents collaborate to track the global minimizers of a sum of time-varying objective functions in an online manner. Specifically, we propose a novel distributed online gradient descent algorithm that relies on an online adaptation of the gradient tracking technique used in static optimization. We show that the dynamic regret bound of this algorithm has no explicit dependence on the time horizon and, therefore, can be tighter than existing bounds especially for problems with long horizons. Our bound depends on a new regularity measure that quantifies the total change in the gradients at the optimal points at each time instant. Furthermore, when the optimizer is approximatly subject to linear dynamics, we show that the dynamic regret bound can be further tightened by replacing the regularity measure that captures the path length of the optimizer with the accumulated prediction errors, which can be much lower in this special case. We present numerical experiments to corroborate our theoretical results.
We consider the decision-making framework of online convex optimization with a very large number of experts. This setting is ubiquitous in contextual and reinforcement learning problems, where the size of the policy class renders enumeration and search within the policy class infeasible. Instead, we consider generalizing the methodology of online boosting. We define a weak learning algorithm as a mechanism that guarantees multiplicatively approximate regret against a base class of experts. In this access model, we give an efficient boosting algorithm that guarantees near-optimal regret against the convex hull of the base class. We consider both full and partial (a.k.a. bandit) information feedback models. We also give an analogous efficient boosting algorithm for the i.i.d. statistical setting. Our results simultaneously generalize online boosting and gradient boosting guarantees to contextual learning model, online convex optimization and bandit linear optimization settings.
We introduce a new online convex optimization algorithm that adaptively chooses its regularization function based on the loss functions observed so far. This is in contrast to previous algorithms that use a fixed regularization function such as L2-squared, and modify it only via a single time-dependent parameter. Our algorithms regret bounds are worst-case optimal, and for certain realistic classes of loss functions they are much better than existing bounds. These bounds are problem-dependent, which means they can exploit the structure of the actual problem instance. Critically, however, our algorithm does not need to know this structure in advance. Rather, we prove competitive guarantees that show the algorithm provides a bound within a constant factor of the best possible bound (of a certain functional form) in hindsight.