We aim to design strategies for sequential decision making that adjust to the difficulty of the learning problem. We study this question both in the setting of prediction with expert advice, and for more general combinatorial decision tasks. We are not satisfied with just guaranteeing minimax regret rates, but we want our algorithms to perform significantly better on easy data. Two popular ways to formalize such adaptivity are second-order regret bounds and quantile bounds. The underlying notions of 'easy data', which may be paraphrased as "the learning problem has small variance" and "multiple decisions are useful", are synergetic. But even though there are sophisticated algorithms that exploit one of the two, no existing algorithm is able to adapt to both. In this paper we outline a new method for obtaining such adaptive algorithms, based on a potential function that aggregates a range of learning rates (which are essential tuning parameters). By choosing the right prior we construct efficient algorithms and show that they reap both benefits by proving the first bounds that are both second-order and incorporate quantiles.
@cite_7: Prediction from expert advice is a fundamental problem in machine learning. A major pillar of the field is the existence of learning algorithms whose average loss approaches that of the best expert in hindsight (in other words, whose average regret approaches zero). Traditionally the regret of online algorithms was bounded in terms of the number of prediction rounds. Cesa-Bianchi, Mansour and Stoltz (Mach. Learn. 66(2---3):21---352, 2007) posed the question whether it is be possible to bound the regret of an online algorithm by the variation of the observed costs. In this paper we resolve this question, and prove such bounds in the fully adversarial setting, in two important online learning scenarios: prediction from expert advice, and online linear optimization.
@cite_8: Abstract We study on-line learning in the linear regression framework. Most of the performance bounds for on-line algorithms in this framework assume a constant learning rate. To achieve these bounds the learning rate must be optimized based on a posteriori information. This information depends on the whole sequence of examples and thus it is not available to any strictly on-line algorithm. We introduce new techniques for adaptively tuning the learning rate as the data sequence is progressively revealed. Our techniques allow us to prove essentially the same bounds as if we knew the optimal learning rate in advance. Moreover, such techniques apply to a wide class of on-line algorithms, including p -norm algorithms for generalized linear regression and Weighted Majority for linear regression with absolute loss. Our adaptive tunings are radically different from previous techniques, such as the so-called doubling trick. Whereas the doubling trick restarts the on-line algorithm several times using a constant learning rate for each run, our methods save information by changing the value of the learning rate very smoothly. In fact, for Weighted Majority over a finite set of experts our analysis provides a better leading constant than the doubling trick.
@cite_3: We study the online convex optimization problem, in which an online algorithm has to make repeated decisions with convex loss functions and hopes to achieve a small regret. We consider a natural restriction of this problem in which the loss functions have a small deviation, measured by the sum of the distances between every two consecutive loss functions, according to some distance metrics. We show that for the linear and general smooth convex loss functions, an online algorithm modified from the gradient descend algorithm can achieve a regret which only scales as the square root of the deviation. For the closely related problem of prediction with expert advice, we show that an online algorithm modified from the multiplicative update algorithm can also achieve a similar regret bound for a different measure of deviation. Finally, for loss functions which are strictly convex, we show that an online algorithm modified from the online Newton step algorithm can achieve a regret which is only logarithmic in terms of the deviation, and as an application, we can also have such a logarithmic regret for the portfolio management problem.
@cite_0: Follow-the-Leader (FTL) is an intuitive sequential prediction strategy that guarantees constant regret in the stochastic setting, but has poor performance for worst-case data. Other hedging strategies have better worst-case guarantees but may perform much worse than FTL if the data are not maximally adversarial. We introduce the FlipFlop algorithm, which is the first method that provably combines the best of both worlds. As a stepping stone for our analysis, we develop AdaHedge, which is a new way of dynamically tuning the learning rate in Hedge without using the doubling trick. AdaHedge refines a method by Cesa-Bianchi, Mansour, and Stoltz (2007), yielding improved worst-case guarantees. By interleaving AdaHedge and FTL, FlipFlop achieves regret within a constant factor of the FTL regret, without sacrificing AdaHedge's worst-case guarantees. AdaHedge and FlipFlop do not need to know the range of the losses in advance; moreover, unlike earlier methods, both have the intuitive property that the issued weights are invariant under rescaling and translation of the losses. The losses are also allowed to be negative, in which case they may be interpreted as gains.
@cite_15: 
@cite_13: We study online aggregation of the predictions of experts, and first show new second-order regret bounds in the standard setting, which are obtained via a version of the Prod algorithm (and also a version of the polynomially weighted average algorithm) with multiple learning rates. These bounds are in terms of excess losses, the differences between the instantaneous losses suffered by the algorithm and the ones of a given expert. We then demonstrate the interest of these bounds in the context of experts that report their confidences as a number in the interval [0; 1] using a generic reduction to the standard setting. We conclude by two other applications in the standard setting, which improve the known bounds in case of small excess losses and show a bounded regret against i.i.d. sequences of losses.
Obtaining bounds for easy data in the experts setting is typically achieved by adaptively tuning a , which is a parameter found in many algorithms. Schemes for the learning rate on-line are built by @cite_8 @cite_15 @cite_7 @cite_0 @cite_13 @cite_3 . These schemes typically choose a monotonically decreasing sequence of learning rates to prove a certain regret bound.