Revisiting Regret Benchmarks in Online Non-Stochastic Control

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Hebbar, Vijeth, Langbort, Cédric
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Hebbar, Vijeth
Langbort, Cédric
author_facet Hebbar, Vijeth
Langbort, Cédric
contents In the online non-stochastic control problem, an agent sequentially selects control inputs for a linear dynamical system when facing unknown and adversarially selected convex costs and disturbances. A common metric for evaluating control policies in this setting is policy regret, defined relative to the best-in-hindsight linear feedback controller. However, for general convex costs, this benchmark may be less meaningful since linear controllers can be highly suboptimal. To address this, we introduce an alternative, more suitable benchmark--the performance of the best fixed input. We show that this benchmark can be viewed as a natural extension of the standard benchmark used in online convex optimization and propose a novel online control algorithm that achieves sublinear regret with respect to this new benchmark. We also discuss the connections between our method and the original one proposed by Agarwal et al. in their seminal work introducing the online non-stochastic control problem, and compare the performance of both approaches through numerical simulations.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_16581
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Regret Benchmarks in Online Non-Stochastic Control
Hebbar, Vijeth
Langbort, Cédric
Optimization and Control
Systems and Control
In the online non-stochastic control problem, an agent sequentially selects control inputs for a linear dynamical system when facing unknown and adversarially selected convex costs and disturbances. A common metric for evaluating control policies in this setting is policy regret, defined relative to the best-in-hindsight linear feedback controller. However, for general convex costs, this benchmark may be less meaningful since linear controllers can be highly suboptimal. To address this, we introduce an alternative, more suitable benchmark--the performance of the best fixed input. We show that this benchmark can be viewed as a natural extension of the standard benchmark used in online convex optimization and propose a novel online control algorithm that achieves sublinear regret with respect to this new benchmark. We also discuss the connections between our method and the original one proposed by Agarwal et al. in their seminal work introducing the online non-stochastic control problem, and compare the performance of both approaches through numerical simulations.
title Revisiting Regret Benchmarks in Online Non-Stochastic Control
topic Optimization and Control
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16581