An efficient high-probability algorithm for Linear Bandits

Abstract

For the linear bandit problem, we extend the analysis of algorithm CombEXP from [R. Combes, M. S. Talebi Mazraeh Shahi, A. Proutiere, and M. Lelarge. Combinatorial bandits revisited. In C. Cortes, N. D. Lawrence, D. D. Lee, M. Sugiyama, and R. Garnett, editors, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 28, pages 2116--2124. Curran Associates, Inc., 2015. URL http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5831-combinatorial-bandits-revisited.pdf] to the high-probability case against adaptive adversaries, allowing actions to come from an arbitrary polytope. We prove a high-probability regret of \(O(T^{2/3})\) for time horizon \(T\). While this bound is weaker than the optimal \(O(\sqrt{T})\) bound achieved by GeometricHedge in [P. L. Bartlett, V. Dani, T. Hayes, S. Kakade, A. Rakhlin, and A. Tewari. High-probability regret bounds for bandit online linear optimization. In 21th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2008), July 2008. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/45706/1/30-Bartlett.pdf], CombEXP is computationally efficient, requiring only an efficient linear optimization oracle over the convex hull of the actions.