Oracle-Efficient Online Learning for Smoothed Adversaries

Nika Haghtalab, Yanjun Han, Abhishek Shetty, Kunhe Yang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

We study the design of computationally efficient online learning algorithms under smoothed analysis. In this setting, at every step an adversary generates a sample from an adaptively chosen distribution whose density is upper bounded by 1/σ times the uniform density. Given access to an offline optimization (ERM) oracle, we give the first computationally efficient online algorithms whose sublinear regret depends only on the pseudo/VC dimension d of the class and the smoothness parameter σ. In particular, we achieve oracle-efficient regret bounds of (Equation presented) for learning real-valued functions and (Equation presented) for learning binary-valued functions. Our results establish that online learning is computationally as easy as offline learning, under the smoothed analysis framework. This contrasts the computational separation between online learning with worst-case adversaries and offline learning established by [HK16]. Our algorithms also achieve improved bounds for some settings with binary-valued functions and worst-case adversaries. These include an oracle-efficient algorithm with (Equation presented) regret that refines the earlier (Equation presented) bound of [DS16] for finite domains, and an oracle-efficient algorithm with (Equation presented) regret for the transductive setting.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 - 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2022
EditorsS. Koyejo, S. Mohamed, A. Agarwal, D. Belgrave, K. Cho, A. Oh
PublisherNeural information processing systems foundation
ISBN (Electronic)9781713871088
StatePublished - 2022
Event36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2022 - New Orleans, United States
Duration: Nov 28 2022Dec 9 2022

Publication series

NameAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Volume35
ISSN (Print)1049-5258

Conference

Conference36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Orleans
Period11/28/2212/9/22

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Signal Processing

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