Revisiting Multi-Agent Asynchronous Online Optimization with Delays: the Strongly Convex Case

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Autori principali: Bao, Lingchan, Wei, Tong, Wan, Yuanyu
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Bao, Lingchan
Wei, Tong
Wan, Yuanyu
author_facet Bao, Lingchan
Wei, Tong
Wan, Yuanyu
contents We revisit multi-agent asynchronous online optimization with delays, where only one of the agents becomes active for making the decision at each round, and the corresponding feedback is received by all the agents after unknown delays. Although previous studies have established an $O(\sqrt{dT})$ regret bound for this problem, they assume that the maximum delay $d$ is knowable or the arrival order of feedback satisfies a special property, which may not hold in practice. In this paper, we surprisingly find that when the loss functions are strongly convex, these assumptions can be eliminated, and the existing regret bound can be significantly improved to $O(d\log T)$ meanwhile. Specifically, to exploit the strong convexity of functions, we first propose a delayed variant of the classical follow-the-leader algorithm, namely FTDL, which is very simple but requires the full information of functions as feedback. Moreover, to handle the more general case with only the gradient feedback, we develop an approximate variant of FTDL by combining it with surrogate loss functions. Experimental results show that the approximate FTDL outperforms the existing algorithm in the strongly convex case.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_10013
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Multi-Agent Asynchronous Online Optimization with Delays: the Strongly Convex Case
Bao, Lingchan
Wei, Tong
Wan, Yuanyu
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
We revisit multi-agent asynchronous online optimization with delays, where only one of the agents becomes active for making the decision at each round, and the corresponding feedback is received by all the agents after unknown delays. Although previous studies have established an $O(\sqrt{dT})$ regret bound for this problem, they assume that the maximum delay $d$ is knowable or the arrival order of feedback satisfies a special property, which may not hold in practice. In this paper, we surprisingly find that when the loss functions are strongly convex, these assumptions can be eliminated, and the existing regret bound can be significantly improved to $O(d\log T)$ meanwhile. Specifically, to exploit the strong convexity of functions, we first propose a delayed variant of the classical follow-the-leader algorithm, namely FTDL, which is very simple but requires the full information of functions as feedback. Moreover, to handle the more general case with only the gradient feedback, we develop an approximate variant of FTDL by combining it with surrogate loss functions. Experimental results show that the approximate FTDL outperforms the existing algorithm in the strongly convex case.
title Revisiting Multi-Agent Asynchronous Online Optimization with Delays: the Strongly Convex Case
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10013