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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Zhiyu, Bombara, David, Yang, Heng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02720
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author Zhang, Zhiyu
Bombara, David
Yang, Heng
author_facet Zhang, Zhiyu
Bombara, David
Yang, Heng
contents We study online learning in adversarial nonstationary environments. Since the future can be very different from the past, a critical challenge is to gracefully forget the history while new data comes in. To formalize this intuition, we revisit the discounted regret in online convex optimization, and propose an adaptive (i.e., instance optimal), FTRL-based algorithm that improves the widespread non-adaptive baseline -- gradient descent with a constant learning rate. From a practical perspective, this refines the classical idea of regularization in lifelong learning: we show that designing good regularizers can be guided by the principled theory of adaptive online optimization. Complementing this result, we also consider the (Gibbs and Candès, 2021)-style online conformal prediction problem, where the goal is to sequentially predict the uncertainty sets of a black-box machine learning model. We show that the FTRL nature of our algorithm can simplify the conventional gradient-descent-based analysis, leading to instance-dependent performance guarantees.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_02720
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Discounted Adaptive Online Learning: Towards Better Regularization
Zhang, Zhiyu
Bombara, David
Yang, Heng
Machine Learning
We study online learning in adversarial nonstationary environments. Since the future can be very different from the past, a critical challenge is to gracefully forget the history while new data comes in. To formalize this intuition, we revisit the discounted regret in online convex optimization, and propose an adaptive (i.e., instance optimal), FTRL-based algorithm that improves the widespread non-adaptive baseline -- gradient descent with a constant learning rate. From a practical perspective, this refines the classical idea of regularization in lifelong learning: we show that designing good regularizers can be guided by the principled theory of adaptive online optimization. Complementing this result, we also consider the (Gibbs and Candès, 2021)-style online conformal prediction problem, where the goal is to sequentially predict the uncertainty sets of a black-box machine learning model. We show that the FTRL nature of our algorithm can simplify the conventional gradient-descent-based analysis, leading to instance-dependent performance guarantees.
title Discounted Adaptive Online Learning: Towards Better Regularization
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02720