Online AUC Optimization Based on Second-order Surrogate Loss

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Luo, JunRu, Cheng, Difei, Zhang, Bo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Luo, JunRu
Cheng, Difei
Zhang, Bo
author_facet Luo, JunRu
Cheng, Difei
Zhang, Bo
contents The Area Under the Curve (AUC) is an important performance metric for classification tasks, particularly in class-imbalanced scenarios. However, minimizing the AUC presents significant challenges due to the non-convex and discontinuous nature of pairwise 0/1 losses, which are difficult to optimize, as well as the substantial memory cost of instance-wise storage, which creates bottlenecks in large-scale applications. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel second-order surrogate loss based on the pairwise hinge loss, and develop an efficient online algorithm. Unlike conventional approaches that approximate each individual pairwise 0/1 loss term with an instance-wise surrogate function, our approach introduces a new paradigm that directly substitutes the entire aggregated pairwise loss with a surrogate loss function constructed from the first- and second-order statistics of the training data. Theoretically, while existing online AUC optimization algorithms typically achieve an $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret bound, our method attains a tighter $\mathcal{O}(\ln T)$ bound. Furthermore, we extend the proposed framework to nonlinear settings through a kernel-based formulation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed second-order surrogate loss in optimizing online AUC performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_21202
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Online AUC Optimization Based on Second-order Surrogate Loss
Luo, JunRu
Cheng, Difei
Zhang, Bo
Machine Learning
68T05
I.5.0
The Area Under the Curve (AUC) is an important performance metric for classification tasks, particularly in class-imbalanced scenarios. However, minimizing the AUC presents significant challenges due to the non-convex and discontinuous nature of pairwise 0/1 losses, which are difficult to optimize, as well as the substantial memory cost of instance-wise storage, which creates bottlenecks in large-scale applications. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel second-order surrogate loss based on the pairwise hinge loss, and develop an efficient online algorithm. Unlike conventional approaches that approximate each individual pairwise 0/1 loss term with an instance-wise surrogate function, our approach introduces a new paradigm that directly substitutes the entire aggregated pairwise loss with a surrogate loss function constructed from the first- and second-order statistics of the training data. Theoretically, while existing online AUC optimization algorithms typically achieve an $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret bound, our method attains a tighter $\mathcal{O}(\ln T)$ bound. Furthermore, we extend the proposed framework to nonlinear settings through a kernel-based formulation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed second-order surrogate loss in optimizing online AUC performance.
title Online AUC Optimization Based on Second-order Surrogate Loss
topic Machine Learning
68T05
I.5.0
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21202