A Dimension-free Algorithm for Contextual Continuum-armed Bandits

07/15/2019

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by   Wenhao Li, et al.

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In contextual continuum-armed bandits, the contexts x and the arms y are both continuous and drawn from high-dimensional spaces. The payoff function to learn f(x,y) does not have a particular parametric form. The literature has shown that for Lipschitz-continuous functions, the optimal regret is Õ(T^d_x+d_y+1/d_x+d_y+2), where d_x and d_y are the dimensions of contexts and arms, and thus suffers from the curse of dimensionality. We develop an algorithm that achieves regret Õ(T^d_x+1/d_x+2) when f is globally concave in y. The global concavity is a common assumption in many applications. The algorithm is based on stochastic approximation and estimates the gradient information in an online fashion. Our results generate a valuable insight that the curse of dimensionality of the arms can be overcome with some mild structures of the payoff function.