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Main Authors: Wang, Jing, Zhang, Yu-Jie, Zhao, Peng, Zhou, Zhi-Hua
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00419
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author Wang, Jing
Zhang, Yu-Jie
Zhao, Peng
Zhou, Zhi-Hua
author_facet Wang, Jing
Zhang, Yu-Jie
Zhao, Peng
Zhou, Zhi-Hua
contents We study the stochastic linear bandits with heavy-tailed noise. Two principled strategies for handling heavy-tailed noise, truncation and median-of-means, have been introduced to heavy-tailed bandits. Nonetheless, these methods rely on specific noise assumptions or bandit structures, limiting their applicability to general settings. The recent work [Huang et al.2024] develops a soft truncation method via the adaptive Huber regression to address these limitations. However, their method suffers undesired computational costs: it requires storing all historical data and performing a full pass over these data at each round. In this paper, we propose a \emph{one-pass} algorithm based on the online mirror descent framework. Our method updates using only current data at each round, reducing the per-round computational cost from $\mathcal{O}(t \log T)$ to $\mathcal{O}(1)$ with respect to current round $t$ and the time horizon $T$, and achieves a near-optimal and variance-aware regret of order $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\big(d T^{\frac{1-ε}{2(1+ε)}} \sqrt{\sum_{t=1}^T ν_t^2} + d T^{\frac{1-ε}{2(1+ε)}}\big)$ where $d$ is the dimension and $ν_t^{1+ε}$ is the $(1+ε)$-th central moment of reward at round $t$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_00419
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Heavy-Tailed Linear Bandits: Huber Regression with One-Pass Update
Wang, Jing
Zhang, Yu-Jie
Zhao, Peng
Zhou, Zhi-Hua
Machine Learning
We study the stochastic linear bandits with heavy-tailed noise. Two principled strategies for handling heavy-tailed noise, truncation and median-of-means, have been introduced to heavy-tailed bandits. Nonetheless, these methods rely on specific noise assumptions or bandit structures, limiting their applicability to general settings. The recent work [Huang et al.2024] develops a soft truncation method via the adaptive Huber regression to address these limitations. However, their method suffers undesired computational costs: it requires storing all historical data and performing a full pass over these data at each round. In this paper, we propose a \emph{one-pass} algorithm based on the online mirror descent framework. Our method updates using only current data at each round, reducing the per-round computational cost from $\mathcal{O}(t \log T)$ to $\mathcal{O}(1)$ with respect to current round $t$ and the time horizon $T$, and achieves a near-optimal and variance-aware regret of order $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\big(d T^{\frac{1-ε}{2(1+ε)}} \sqrt{\sum_{t=1}^T ν_t^2} + d T^{\frac{1-ε}{2(1+ε)}}\big)$ where $d$ is the dimension and $ν_t^{1+ε}$ is the $(1+ε)$-th central moment of reward at round $t$.
title Heavy-Tailed Linear Bandits: Huber Regression with One-Pass Update
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00419