Regret minimization in Linear Bandits with offline data via extended D-optimal exploration

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Autori principali: Vijayan, Sushant, Suggala, Arun, Shanmugam, Karthikeyan, Pal, Soumyabrata
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Vijayan, Sushant
Suggala, Arun
Shanmugam, Karthikeyan
Pal, Soumyabrata
author_facet Vijayan, Sushant
Suggala, Arun
Shanmugam, Karthikeyan
Pal, Soumyabrata
contents We consider the problem of online regret minimization in linear bandits with access to prior observations (offline data) from the underlying bandit model. There are numerous applications where extensive offline data is often available, such as in recommendation systems, online advertising. Consequently, this problem has been studied intensively in recent literature. Our algorithm, Offline-Online Phased Elimination (OOPE), effectively incorporates the offline data to substantially reduce the online regret compared to prior work. To leverage offline information prudently, OOPE uses an extended D-optimal design within each exploration phase. OOPE achieves an online regret is $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{\deff T \log \left(|\mathcal{A}|T\right)}+d^2)$. $\deff \leq d)$ is the effective problem dimension which measures the number of poorly explored directions in offline data and depends on the eigen-spectrum $(λ_k)_{k \in [d]}$ of the Gram matrix of the offline data. The eigen-spectrum $(λ_k)_{k \in [d]}$ is a quantitative measure of the \emph{quality} of offline data. If the offline data is poorly explored ($\deff \approx d$), we recover the established regret bounds for purely online setting while, when offline data is abundant ($\Toff >> T$) and well-explored ($\deff = o(1) $), the online regret reduces substantially. Additionally, we provide the first known minimax regret lower bounds in this setting that depend explicitly on the quality of the offline data. These lower bounds establish the optimality of our algorithm in regimes where offline data is either well-explored or poorly explored. Finally, by using a Frank-Wolfe approximation to the extended optimal design we further improve the $O(d^{2})$ term to $O\left(\frac{d^{2}}{\deff} \min \{ \deff,1\} \right)$, which can be substantial in high dimensions with moderate quality of offline data $\deff = Ω(1)$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_08420
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Regret minimization in Linear Bandits with offline data via extended D-optimal exploration
Vijayan, Sushant
Suggala, Arun
Shanmugam, Karthikeyan
Pal, Soumyabrata
Machine Learning
We consider the problem of online regret minimization in linear bandits with access to prior observations (offline data) from the underlying bandit model. There are numerous applications where extensive offline data is often available, such as in recommendation systems, online advertising. Consequently, this problem has been studied intensively in recent literature. Our algorithm, Offline-Online Phased Elimination (OOPE), effectively incorporates the offline data to substantially reduce the online regret compared to prior work. To leverage offline information prudently, OOPE uses an extended D-optimal design within each exploration phase. OOPE achieves an online regret is $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{\deff T \log \left(|\mathcal{A}|T\right)}+d^2)$. $\deff \leq d)$ is the effective problem dimension which measures the number of poorly explored directions in offline data and depends on the eigen-spectrum $(λ_k)_{k \in [d]}$ of the Gram matrix of the offline data. The eigen-spectrum $(λ_k)_{k \in [d]}$ is a quantitative measure of the \emph{quality} of offline data. If the offline data is poorly explored ($\deff \approx d$), we recover the established regret bounds for purely online setting while, when offline data is abundant ($\Toff >> T$) and well-explored ($\deff = o(1) $), the online regret reduces substantially. Additionally, we provide the first known minimax regret lower bounds in this setting that depend explicitly on the quality of the offline data. These lower bounds establish the optimality of our algorithm in regimes where offline data is either well-explored or poorly explored. Finally, by using a Frank-Wolfe approximation to the extended optimal design we further improve the $O(d^{2})$ term to $O\left(\frac{d^{2}}{\deff} \min \{ \deff,1\} \right)$, which can be substantial in high dimensions with moderate quality of offline data $\deff = Ω(1)$.
title Regret minimization in Linear Bandits with offline data via extended D-optimal exploration
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08420