针对重尾损失,提出自适应算法避免误差项主导结果。
When Lower-Order Terms Dominate: Adaptive Expert Algorithms for Heavy-Tailed Losses
- 设计无需先验知识的自适应算法,应对损失方差有界场景。
- 最坏情况下 regret 为 𝒪(√(θT log K)),独立于最大损失项。
- 适合损失分布不规则或需鲁棒性保障的研究者使用。
我们研究在可能具有重尾损失的专家建议预测问题,仅假设损失的二阶矩有上界 θ。提出无需事先知道损失范围或二阶矩的自适应算法。现有自适应算法的后悔界中通常包含一个被视为低阶项的量,但在本设置下,该低阶项(常为最大损失)可能主导整体边界。具体而言,即使 θ 为小常数,该低阶项仍可达到 √(KT),其中 K 为专家数,T 为时间步长。我们提出的算法消除了对这一低阶项的依赖,最坏情况下保证 𝒪(√(θT log K)) 的后悔,当损失从固定分布独立同分布采样时,可达到 𝒪(θ log(KT)/Δ_min)。此外,在平方损失函数下,算法性能优于已有结果。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We consider the problem setting of prediction with expert advice with possibly heavy-tailed losses, i.e. the only assumption on the losses is an upper bound on their second moments, denoted by $θ$. We develop adaptive algorithms that do not require any prior knowledge about the range or the second moment of the losses. Existing adaptive algorithms have what is typically considered a lower-order term in their regret guarantees. We show that this lower-order term, which is often the maximum of the losses, can actually dominate the regret bound in our setting. Specifically, we show that even with small constant $θ$, this lower-order term can scale as $\sqrt{KT}$, where $K$ is the number of experts and $T$ is the time horizon. We propose adaptive algorithms with improved regret bounds that avoid the dependence on such a lower-order term and guarantee $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{θT\log(K)})$ regret in the worst case, and $\mathcal{O}(θ\log(KT)/Δ_{\min})$ regret when the losses are sampled i.i.d. from some fixed distribution, where $Δ_{\min}$ is the difference between the mean losses of the second best expert and the best expert. Additionally, when the loss function is the squared loss, our algorithm also guarantees improved regret bounds over prior results.
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