Zeroth Order Non-convex optimization with Dueling-Choice Bandits
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We consider a novel setting of zeroth order non-convex optimization, where in addition to querying the function value at a given point, we can also duel two points and get the point with the larger function value. We refer to this setting as optimization with dueling-choice bandits since both direct queries and duels are available for optimization. We give the COMP-GP-UCB algorithm based on GP-UCB (Srinivas et al., 2009), where instead of directly querying the point with the maximum Upper Confidence Bound (UCB), we perform a constrained optimization and use comparisons to filter out suboptimal points. COMP-GP-UCB comes with theoretical guarantee of O(Φ/√(T)) on simple regret where T is the number of direct queries and Φ is an improved information gain corresponding to a comparison based constraint set that restricts the search space for the optimum. In contrast, in the direct query only setting, Φ depends on the entire domain. Finally, we present experimental results to show the efficacy of our algorithm.
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