No Arabic abstract
We investigate multiarmed bandits with delayed feedback, where the delays need neither be identical nor bounded. We first prove that delayed Exp3 achieves the $O(sqrt{(KT + D)ln K} )$ regret bound conjectured by Cesa-Bianchi et al. [2019] in the case of variable, but bounded delays. Here, $K$ is the number of actions and $D$ is the total delay over $T$ rounds. We then introduce a new algorithm that lifts the requirement of bounded delays by using a wrapper that skips rounds with excessively large delays. The new algorithm maintains the same regret bound, but similar to its predecessor requires prior knowledge of $D$ and $T$. For this algorithm we then construct a novel doubling scheme that forgoes the prior knowledge requirement under the assumption that the delays are available at action time (rather than at loss observation time). This assumption is satisfied in a broad range of applications, including interaction with servers and service providers. The resulting oracle regret bound is of order $min_beta (|S_beta|+beta ln K + (KT + D_beta)/beta)$, where $|S_beta|$ is the number of observations with delay exceeding $beta$, and $D_beta$ is the total delay of observations with delay below $beta$. The bound relaxes to $O (sqrt{(KT + D)ln K} )$, but we also provide examples where $D_beta ll D$ and the oracle bound has a polynomially better dependence on the problem parameters.
We propose a new algorithm for adversarial multi-armed bandits with unrestricted delays. The algorithm is based on a novel hybrid regularizer applied in the Follow the Regularized Leader (FTRL) framework. It achieves $mathcal{O}(sqrt{kn}+sqrt{Dlog(k)})$ regret guarantee, where $k$ is the number of arms, $n$ is the number of rounds, and $D$ is the total delay. The result matches the lower bound within constants and requires no prior knowledge of $n$ or $D$. Additionally, we propose a refined tuning of the algorithm, which achieves $mathcal{O}(sqrt{kn}+min_{S}|S|+sqrt{D_{bar S}log(k)})$ regret guarantee, where $S$ is a set of rounds excluded from delay counting, $bar S = [n]setminus S$ are the counted rounds, and $D_{bar S}$ is the total delay in the counted rounds. If the delays are highly unbalanced, the latter regret guarantee can be significantly tighter than the former. The result requires no advance knowledge of the delays and resolves an open problem of Thune et al. (2019). The new FTRL algorithm and its refined tuning are anytime and require no doubling, which resolves another open problem of Thune et al. (2019).
We consider the problem of controlling an unknown linear dynamical system in the presence of (nonstochastic) adversarial perturbations and adversarial convex loss functions. In contrast to classical control, the a priori determination of an optimal controller here is hindered by the latters dependence on the yet unknown perturbations and costs. Instead, we measure regret against an optimal linear policy in hindsight, and give the first efficient algorithm that guarantees a sublinear regret bound, scaling as T^{2/3}, in this setting.
Consider a player that in each round $t$ out of $T$ rounds chooses an action and observes the incurred cost after a delay of $d_{t}$ rounds. The cost functions and the delay sequence are chosen by an adversary. We show that even if the players algorithms lose their no regret property due to too large delays, the expected discounted ergodic distribution of play converges to the set of coarse correlated equilibrium (CCE) if the algorithms have no discounted-regret. For a zero-sum game, we show that no discounted-regret is sufficient for the discounted ergodic average of play to converge to the set of Nash equilibria. We prove that the FKM algorithm with $n$ dimensions achieves a regret of $Oleft(nT^{frac{3}{4}}+sqrt{n}T^{frac{1}{3}}D^{frac{1}{3}}right)$ and the EXP3 algorithm with $K$ arms achieves a regret of $Oleft(sqrt{ln Kleft(KT+Dright)}right)$ even when $D=sum_{t=1}^{T}d_{t}$ and $T$ are unknown. These bounds use a novel doubling trick that provably retains the regret bound for when $D$ and $T$ are known. Using these bounds, we show that EXP3 and FKM have no discounted-regret even for $d_{t}=Oleft(tlog tright)$. Therefore, the CCE of a finite or convex unknown game can be approximated even when only delayed bandit feedback is available via simulation.
This paper deals with bandit online learning problems involving feedback of unknown delay that can emerge in multi-armed bandit (MAB) and bandit convex optimization (BCO) settings. MAB and BCO require only values of the objective function involved that become available through feedback, and are used to estimate the gradient appearing in the corresponding iterative algorithms. Since the challenging case of feedback with emph{unknown} delays prevents one from constructing the sought gradient estimates, existing MAB and BCO algorithms become intractable. For such challenging setups, delayed exploration, exploitation, and exponential (DEXP3) iterations, along with delayed bandit gradient descent (DBGD) iterations are developed for MAB and BCO, respectively. Leveraging a unified analysis framework, it is established that the regret of DEXP3 and DBGD are ${cal O}big( sqrt{Kbar{d}(T+D)} big)$ and ${cal O}big( sqrt{K(T+D)} big)$, respectively, where $bar{d}$ is the maximum delay and $D$ denotes the delay accumulated over $T$ slots. Numerical tests using both synthetic and real data validate the performance of DEXP3 and DBGD.
We consider a stochastic bandit problem with a possibly infinite number of arms. We write $p^*$ for the proportion of optimal arms and $Delta$ for the minimal mean-gap between optimal and sub-optimal arms. We characterize the optimal learning rates both in the cumulative regret setting, and in the best-arm identification setting in terms of the problem parameters $T$ (the budget), $p^*$ and $Delta$. For the objective of minimizing the cumulative regret, we provide a lower bound of order $Omega(log(T)/(p^*Delta))$ and a UCB-style algorithm with matching upper bound up to a factor of $log(1/Delta)$. Our algorithm needs $p^*$ to calibrate its parameters, and we prove that this knowledge is necessary, since adapting to $p^*$ in this setting is impossible. For best-arm identification we also provide a lower bound of order $Omega(exp(-cTDelta^2p^*))$ on the probability of outputting a sub-optimal arm where $c>0$ is an absolute constant. We also provide an elimination algorithm with an upper bound matching the lower bound up to a factor of order $log(1/Delta)$ in the exponential, and that does not need $p^*$ or $Delta$ as parameter.