Adversarially Robust Multi-Armed Bandit Algorithm with Variance-Dependent Regret Bounds
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This paper considers the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem and provides a new best-of-both-worlds (BOBW) algorithm that works nearly optimally in both stochastic and adversarial settings. In stochastic settings, some existing BOBW algorithms achieve tight gap-dependent regret bounds of O(∑_i: Δ_i>0log T/Δ_i) for suboptimality gap Δ_i of arm i and time horizon T. As Audibert et al. [2007] have shown, however, that the performance can be improved in stochastic environments with low-variance arms. In fact, they have provided a stochastic MAB algorithm with gap-variance-dependent regret bounds of O(∑_i: Δ_i>0 (σ_i^2/Δ_i + 1) log T ) for loss variance σ_i^2 of arm i. In this paper, we propose the first BOBW algorithm with gap-variance-dependent bounds, showing that the variance information can be used even in the possibly adversarial environment. Further, the leading constant factor in our gap-variance dependent bound is only (almost) twice the value for the lower bound. Additionally, the proposed algorithm enjoys multiple data-dependent regret bounds in adversarial settings and works well in stochastic settings with adversarial corruptions. The proposed algorithm is based on the follow-the-regularized-leader method and employs adaptive learning rates that depend on the empirical prediction error of the loss, which leads to gap-variance-dependent regret bounds reflecting the variance of the arms.
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