CRW-FTRL 算法解决强腐蚀对抗线性老虎机问题
Nearly Minimax Optimal Regret for Adversarial Linear Bandits with Strong Corruptions
理论向的新论文:CRW-FTRL 把强腐蚀线性老虎机的遗憾界压到 Õ(d√T+dC),补上了 Liu et al. 2024 留下的 √d 缺口,做 bandit 理论的值得看。
论文研究强腐蚀设定下的对抗线性老虎机:对手可针对学习者动作腐蚀奖励,腐蚀总量为已知预算 C。此前的最优界是 Liu et al. (2024) 提出的 Õ(√(d³T)+dC),其主项比无腐蚀速率多出 √d 因子,能否达到 Õ(d√T+dC) 一直是开放问题。论文提出 CRW-FTRL 算法,采用半径加权熵正则化的 FTRL 框架,配合归一化核估计器,用每动作半径而非逆采样概率来控制腐蚀敏感度。对 K 个动作、维度 d 的设定,该算法达到 Õ(√(dT log K)+dC) 遗憾界,匹配无腐蚀最优速率和 Ω(dC) 下界(对数因子内),并对一般紧致动作集给出 Õ(d√T+dC),解决了该问题的统计速率。
Nearly Minimax Optimal Regret for Adversarial Linear Bandits with Strong Corruptions
We study adversarial linear bandits with strong corruption, in which an adaptive adversary chooses the reward vectors and a strong adversary corrupts each observed reward after seeing the learner's action, subject to a known total corruption budget $C$. Strong corruption breaks the importance-weighted reward estimates used by adversarial bandit algorithms: by corrupting only the rounds in which a rarely sampled action is drawn, the adversary amplifies each unit of corruption by the inverse of its sampling probability. The best known bound for this problem, $\tilde O(\sqrt{d^3T} + dC)$ by Liu et al. (2024), is a factor $\sqrt{d}$ above the corruption-free rate in its leading term, and whether $\tilde O(d\sqrt{T} + dC)$ regret is achievable was left open. We propose CRW-FTRL, which runs follow-the-regularized-leader with a radius-weighted entropy regularizer and estimates rewards with a normalized kernel estimator whose sensitivity to corruption is governed by per-action radii instead of inverse sampling probabilities. The radii are nondecreasing and are chosen jointly with the sampling distribution through a monotone log-determinant barrier problem, so that a negative linear term in the regularizer cancels both the corruption bias and the estimation error of every comparator. For $K$ actions in $\mathbb{R}^d$, CRW-FTRL achieves $\tilde O(\sqrt{dT\log K} + dC)$ regret with high probability against an adaptive adversary, which matches the best known corruption-free rate and the $Ω(dC)$ lower bound up to logarithmic factors. Applied to a discretization of a general compact action set, it yields $\tilde O(d\sqrt{T} + dC)$ regret, which settles the statistical rate of corrupted adversarial linear bandits under strong corruption.