Adversarial Online Learning with Changing Action Sets: Efficient Algorithms with Approximate Regret Bounds

Abstract

We revisit the problem of online learning with sleeping experts/bandits: in each time step, only a subset of the actions are available for the algorithm to choose from (and learn about). The work of Kleinberg et al. (2010) showed that there exist no-regret algorithms which perform no worse than the best ranking of actions asymptotically. Unfortunately, achieving this regret bound appears computationally hard: Kanade and Steinke (2014) showed that achieving this no-regret performance is at least as hard as PAC-learning DNFs, a notoriously difficult problem. In the present work, we relax the original problem and study computationally efficient no-approximate-regret algorithms: such algorithms may exceed the optimal cost by a multiplicative constant in addition to the additive regret. We give an algorithm that provides a no-approximate-regret guarantee for the general sleeping expert/bandit problems. For several canonical special cases of the problem, we give algorithms with significantly better approximation ratios; these algorithms also illustrate different techniques for achieving no-approximate-regret guarantees.

Cite

Text

Emamjomeh-Zadeh et al. "Adversarial Online Learning with Changing Action Sets: Efficient Algorithms with Approximate Regret Bounds." Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory, 2021.

Markdown

[Emamjomeh-Zadeh et al. "Adversarial Online Learning with Changing Action Sets: Efficient Algorithms with Approximate Regret Bounds." Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory, 2021.](https://mlanthology.org/alt/2021/emamjomehzadeh2021alt-adversarial/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{emamjomehzadeh2021alt-adversarial,
  title     = {{Adversarial Online Learning with Changing Action Sets: Efficient Algorithms with Approximate Regret Bounds}},
  author    = {Emamjomeh-Zadeh, Ehsan and Wei, Chen-Yu and Luo, Haipeng and Kempe, David},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory},
  year      = {2021},
  pages     = {599-618},
  volume    = {132},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/alt/2021/emamjomehzadeh2021alt-adversarial/}
}