Non-stationary Online Learning for Curved Losses: Improved Dynamic Regret via Mixability

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Yu-Jie, Zhao, Peng, Sugiyama, Masashi
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zhang, Yu-Jie
Zhao, Peng
Sugiyama, Masashi
author_facet Zhang, Yu-Jie
Zhao, Peng
Sugiyama, Masashi
contents Non-stationary online learning has drawn much attention in recent years. Despite considerable progress, dynamic regret minimization has primarily focused on convex functions, leaving the functions with stronger curvature (e.g., squared or logistic loss) underexplored. In this work, we address this gap by showing that the regret can be substantially improved by leveraging the concept of mixability, a property that generalizes exp-concavity to effectively capture loss curvature. Let $d$ denote the dimensionality and $P_T$ the path length of comparators that reflects the environmental non-stationarity. We demonstrate that an exponential-weight method with fixed-share updates achieves an $\mathcal{O}(d T^{1/3} P_T^{2/3} \log T)$ dynamic regret for mixable losses, improving upon the best-known $\mathcal{O}(d^{10/3} T^{1/3} P_T^{2/3} \log T)$ result (Baby and Wang, 2021) in $d$. More importantly, this improvement arises from a simple yet powerful analytical framework that exploits the mixability, which avoids the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker-based analysis required by existing work.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_10616
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Non-stationary Online Learning for Curved Losses: Improved Dynamic Regret via Mixability
Zhang, Yu-Jie
Zhao, Peng
Sugiyama, Masashi
Machine Learning
Non-stationary online learning has drawn much attention in recent years. Despite considerable progress, dynamic regret minimization has primarily focused on convex functions, leaving the functions with stronger curvature (e.g., squared or logistic loss) underexplored. In this work, we address this gap by showing that the regret can be substantially improved by leveraging the concept of mixability, a property that generalizes exp-concavity to effectively capture loss curvature. Let $d$ denote the dimensionality and $P_T$ the path length of comparators that reflects the environmental non-stationarity. We demonstrate that an exponential-weight method with fixed-share updates achieves an $\mathcal{O}(d T^{1/3} P_T^{2/3} \log T)$ dynamic regret for mixable losses, improving upon the best-known $\mathcal{O}(d^{10/3} T^{1/3} P_T^{2/3} \log T)$ result (Baby and Wang, 2021) in $d$. More importantly, this improvement arises from a simple yet powerful analytical framework that exploits the mixability, which avoids the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker-based analysis required by existing work.
title Non-stationary Online Learning for Curved Losses: Improved Dynamic Regret via Mixability
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10616