Affine policies (or control) are widely used as a solution approach in dynamic optimization where computing an optimal adjustable solution is usually intractable. While the worst case performance of affine policies can be significantly bad, the empirical performance is observed to be near-optimal for a large class of problem instances. For instance, in the two-stage dynamic robust optimization problem with linear covering constraints and uncertain right hand side, the worst-case approximation bound for affine policies is $O(\sqrt m)$ that is also tight (see Bertsimas and Goyal (2012)), whereas observed empirical performance is near-optimal. In this paper, we aim to address this stark-contrast between the worst-case and the empirical performance of affine policies. In particular, we show that affine policies give a good approximation for the two-stage adjustable robust optimization problem with high probability on random instances where the constraint coefficients are generated i.i.d.

Computing an approximately optimal policy with high probability in this case is known as PAC RL with a generative model.

While initial breakthroughs on the convergence of gradient optimization in neural networks (Li & Liang, 2018; Du et al., 2019a; Allen-Zhu et al., 2019) required unrealistic conditions on the

Machine learning for node classification on graphs is a prominent area driven by applications such as recommendation systems.

We study learning problems on correlated stochastic block models with two balanced communities.

Consider a recommendation platform that interacts with a finite set of users in an online fashion. Users arrive at the platform and receive a recommendation.