Online Learning with Unknown Constraints

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Sridharan, Karthik, Yoo, Seung Won Wilson
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866911790461353984
author Sridharan, Karthik
Yoo, Seung Won Wilson
author_facet Sridharan, Karthik
Yoo, Seung Won Wilson
contents We consider the problem of online learning where the sequence of actions played by the learner must adhere to an unknown safety constraint at every round. The goal is to minimize regret with respect to the best safe action in hindsight while simultaneously satisfying the safety constraint with high probability on each round. We provide a general meta-algorithm that leverages an online regression oracle to estimate the unknown safety constraint, and converts the predictions of an online learning oracle to predictions that adhere to the unknown safety constraint. On the theoretical side, our algorithm's regret can be bounded by the regret of the online regression and online learning oracles, the eluder dimension of the model class containing the unknown safety constraint, and a novel complexity measure that captures the difficulty of safe learning. We complement our result with an asymptotic lower bound that shows that the aforementioned complexity measure is necessary. When the constraints are linear, we instantiate our result to provide a concrete algorithm with $\sqrt{T}$ regret using a scaling transformation that balances optimistic exploration with pessimistic constraint satisfaction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_04033
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Online Learning with Unknown Constraints
Sridharan, Karthik
Yoo, Seung Won Wilson
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Statistics Theory
We consider the problem of online learning where the sequence of actions played by the learner must adhere to an unknown safety constraint at every round. The goal is to minimize regret with respect to the best safe action in hindsight while simultaneously satisfying the safety constraint with high probability on each round. We provide a general meta-algorithm that leverages an online regression oracle to estimate the unknown safety constraint, and converts the predictions of an online learning oracle to predictions that adhere to the unknown safety constraint. On the theoretical side, our algorithm's regret can be bounded by the regret of the online regression and online learning oracles, the eluder dimension of the model class containing the unknown safety constraint, and a novel complexity measure that captures the difficulty of safe learning. We complement our result with an asymptotic lower bound that shows that the aforementioned complexity measure is necessary. When the constraints are linear, we instantiate our result to provide a concrete algorithm with $\sqrt{T}$ regret using a scaling transformation that balances optimistic exploration with pessimistic constraint satisfaction.
title Online Learning with Unknown Constraints
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04033