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Poster

Online Composite Optimization Between Stochastic and Adversarial Environments

Yibo Wang · SIJIA CHEN · Wei Jiang · Wenhao Yang · Yuanyu Wan · Lijun Zhang

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Wed 11 Dec 4:30 p.m. PST — 7:30 p.m. PST

Abstract: We study online composite optimization under the Stochastically Extended Adversarial (SEA) model [Sachs et al., 2022]. Specifically, each loss function consists of two parts: a fixed non-smooth and convex regularizer, and a time-varying function which can be chosen either stochastically, adversarially, or in a manner that interpolates between the two extremes. In this setting, we show that for smooth and convex time-varying functions, optimistic composite mirror descent (OptCMD) can obtain an $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\sigma_{1:T}^2} + \sqrt{\Sigma_{1:T}^2})$ regret bound, where $\sigma_{1:T}^2$ and $\Sigma_{1:T}^2$ denote the cumulative stochastic variance and the cumulative adversarial variation of time-varying functions, respectively. For smooth and strongly convex time-varying functions, we establish an $\mathcal{O}((\sigma_{\max}^2 + \Sigma_{\max}^2)\log(\sigma_{1:T}^2 + \Sigma_{1:T}^2))$ regret bound, where $\sigma_{\max}^2$ and $\Sigma_{\max}^2$ denote the maximal stochastic variance and the maximal adversarial variation, respectively. For smooth and exp-concave time-varying functions, we achieve an $\mathcal{O}(d \log (\sigma_{1:T}^2 + \Sigma_{1:T}^2))$ bound where $d$ denotes the dimensionality. All our findings match existing bounds for the SEA model without the regularizer, which implies that there is \textit{no price} in regret bounds for the benefits gained from the regularizer. Moreover, to deal with the unknown function type in real-world problems, we propose a multi-level universal algorithm that is able to achieve the desirable bounds for three types of time-varying functions simultaneously. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first universal algorithm that explicitly supports composite loss functions.

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