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Temporal Variability in Implicit Online Learning
In the setting of online learning, Implicit algorithms turn out to be highly successful from a practical standpoint. However, the tightest regret analyses only show marginal improvements over Online Mirror Descent. In this work, we shed light on this behavior carrying out a careful regret analysis. We prove a novel static regret bound that depends on the temporal variability of the sequence of loss functions, a quantity which is often encountered when considering dynamic competitors. We show, for example, that the regret can be constant if the temporal variability is constant and the learning rate is tuned appropriately, without the need of smooth losses. Moreover, we present an adaptive algorithm that achieves this regret bound without prior knowledge of the temporal variability and prove a matching lower bound.
Provably Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Linear Function Approximation under Adaptivity Constraints
Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) applications often come with possibly infinite state and action space, and in such a situation classical RL algorithms developed in the tabular setting are not applicable anymore. A popular approach to overcoming this issue is by applying function approximation techniques to the underlying structures of the Markov decision processes (MDPs).