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Poster

Adaptive Best-of-Both-Worlds Algorithm for Heavy-Tailed Multi-Armed Bandits

Jiatai Huang · Yan Dai · Longbo Huang

Hall E #1314

Keywords: [ T: Online Learning and Bandits ]


Abstract: In this paper, we generalize the concept of heavy-tailed multi-armed bandits to adversarial environments, and develop robust best-of-both-worlds algorithms for heavy-tailed multi-armed bandits (MAB), where losses have αα-th (1<α21<α2) moments bounded by σασα, while the variances may not exist. Specifically, we design an algorithm \texttt{HTINF}, when the heavy-tail parameters αα and σσ are known to the agent, \texttt{HTINF} simultaneously achieves the optimal regret for both stochastic and adversarial environments, without knowing the actual environment type a-priori. When α,σα,σ are unknown, \texttt{HTINF} achieves a logTlogT-style instance-dependent regret in stochastic cases and o(T)o(T) no-regret guarantee in adversarial cases. We further develop an algorithm \texttt{AdaTINF}, achieving O(σK1\nicefrac1αT\nicefrac1α)O(σK1\nicefrac1αT\nicefrac1α) minimax optimal regret even in adversarial settings, without prior knowledge on αα and σσ. This result matches the known regret lower-bound (Bubeck et al., 2013), which assumed a stochastic environment and αα and σσ are both known. To our knowledge, the proposed \texttt{HTINF} algorithm is the first to enjoy a best-of-both-worlds regret guarantee, and \texttt{AdaTINF} is the first algorithm that can adapt to both αα and σσ to achieve optimal gap-indepedent regret bound in classical heavy-tailed stochastic MAB setting and our novel adversarial formulation.

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