Papers

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

Why we picked it

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。

Original · arXiv cs.LG

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.