A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
We study the regret minimization problem in the novel setting of generalized kernelized bandits (GKBs), where we optimize an unknown function f∗ belonging to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) having access to samples generated by an exponential family (EF) reward model whose mean is a non-linear function $μ(…
We develop a novel family of algorithms for the online learning setting with regret against any data sequence bounded by the empirical Rademacher complexity of that sequence. To develop a general theory of when this type of adaptive regret bound is achievable we establish a connection to the theory of decoupling inequa…
We revisit the proof by Qin et al. (2014) of bounded regret of the C2UCB contextual combinatorial bandit. We demonstrate an error in the proof of volumetric expansion of the moment matrix, used in upper bounding a function of context vector norms. We prove a relaxed inequality that yields the originally-stated regre…
Sharp inequality between TV and Hellinger distances for Gaussian mixtures.
problem Understanding the relationship between total variation and Hellinger distances for Gaussian mixtures.
method Established a general upper bound on Hellinger distance in terms of TV distance raised to a power, demonstrating sharpness with specific examples.
result The Hellinger distance between two Gaussian mixtures is bounded by the TV distance raised to a power 1−o(1), where o(1) is of order 1/loglog(1/TV).
We uncover a fairly general principle in online learning: If regret can be (approximately) expressed as a function of certain "sufficient statistics" for the data sequence, then there exists a special Burkholder function that 1) can be used algorithmically to achieve the regret bound and 2) only depends on these suffic…
We present two alternative ways to apply PAC-Bayesian analysis to sequences of dependent random variables. The first is based on a new lemma that enables to bound expectations of convex functions of certain dependent random variables by expectations of the same functions of independent Bernoulli random variables. This …
This paper considers distributed online optimization with time-varying coupled inequality constraints. The global objective function is composed of local convex cost and regularization functions and the coupled constraint function is the sum of local convex functions. A distributed online primal-dual dynamic mirror des…
We study the regret of optimal strategies for online convex optimization games. Using von Neumann's minimax theorem, we show that the optimal regret in this adversarial setting is closely related to the behavior of the empirical minimization algorithm in a stochastic process setting: it is equal to the maximum, over jo…
New algorithm reduces best-in-class regret in contextual bandits.
problem Compete with the best policy in a class without model restrictions.
method Proposes an algorithm that updates policies by minimizing a pessimistic objective, including a clipped inverse-propensity estimate and variance penalty.
result Achieves fast best-in-class regret rates, including polylogarithmic rates in the parametric case.
Enhanced H-consistency bounds derived under relaxed conditions.
problem Quantifying the relationship between zero-one estimation error and surrogate loss estimation error.
method Relaxing the condition on the surrogate loss conditional regret and presenting a general framework for establishing enhanced H-consistency bounds.
result Derivation of more favorable H-consistency bounds in various scenarios.
New approach for online learning with adaptive adversaries, simpler and more effective.
problem Online learning with adaptive adversaries, especially in bandits and MDPs.
method Uses standard unbiased estimators and a simple increasing learning rate schedule, aided by logarithmically homogeneous self-concordant barriers and strengthened Freedman's inequality.
result First high-probability regret bounds for adversarial bandits and MDPs, resolving open problems.
We study an equivalence of (i) deterministic pathwise statements appearing in the online learning literature (termed \emph{regret bounds}), (ii) high-probability tail bounds for the supremum of a collection of martingales (of a specific form arising from uniform laws of large numbers for martingales), and (iii) in-expe…
Federated Q-Learning achieves linear regret speedup with low communication cost.
problem Achieving linear regret speedup in federated reinforcement learning without high communication costs.
method Proposed two federated Q-Learning algorithms: FedQ-Hoeffding and FedQ-Bernstein, using event-triggered synchronization, novel step size selection, and concentration inequalities.
result Total regrets achieve linear speedup compared to single-agent counterparts with logarithmic communication cost.
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) method is arguably the most celebrated one used in online decision making with partial information feedback. Existing techniques for constructing confidence bounds are typically built upon various concentration inequalities, which thus lead to over-exploration. In this paper, we propose a n…