We study the adversarial Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem with sparse costs under full-information feedback. In the known transition setting, existing bounds based on Online Mirror Descent (OMD) with negative-entropy regularization scale with?

We study online convex optimisation on ℓp-balls in Rd for p > 2. While always sub-linear, the optimal regret exhibits a shift between the high-dimensional setting (d > T), when the dimension d is greater than the time horizon T and the low-dimensional setting (d T). We show that Follow-the-Regularised-Leader (FTRL) with time-varying regularisation which is adaptive to the dimension regime is anytime optimal for all dimension regimes. Motivated by this, we ask whether it is possible to obtain anytime optimality of FTRL with fixed non-adaptive regularisation. Our main result establishes that for separable regularisers, adaptivity in the regulariser is necessary, and that any fixed regulariser will be sub-optimal in one of the two dimension regimes. Finally, we provide lower bounds which rule out sublinear regret bounds for the linear bandit problem in sufficiently high-dimension for all ℓp-balls with p 1.

First-order methods (FOMs) are arguably the most scalable algorithms for equilibrium computation in large extensive-form games. To operationalize these methods, a distance-generating function, acting as a regularizer for the strategy space, must be chosen. The ratio between the strong convexity modulus and the diameter of the regularizer is a key parameter in the analysis of FOMs.A natural question is then: what is the optimal distance-generating function for extensive-form decision spaces? In this paper, we make a number of contributions, ultimately establishing that the weight-one dilated entropy (DilEnt) distance-generating function is optimal up to logarithmic factors. The DilEnt regularizer is notable due to its iterate-equivalence with Kernelized OMWU (KOMWU)---the algorithm with state-of-the-art dependence on the game tree size in extensive-form games---when used in conjunction with the online mirror descent (OMD) algorithm. However, the standard analysis for OMD is unable to establish such a result; the only current analysis is by appealing to the iterate equivalence to KOMWU. We close this gap by introducing a pair of primal-dual treeplex norms, which we contend form the natural analytic viewpoint for studying the strong convexity of DilEnt. Using these norm pairs, we recover the diameter-to-strong-convexity ratio that predicts the same performance as KOMWU. Along with a new regret lower bound for online learning in sequence-form strategy spaces, we show that this ratio is nearly optimal.Finally, we showcase our analytic techniques by refining the analysis of Clairvoyant OMD when paired with DilEnt, establishing an $\mathcal{O}(n \log |\mathcal{V}| \log T/T)$ approximation rate to coarse correlated equilibrium in $n$-player games, where $|\mathcal{V}|$ is the number of reduced normal-form strategies of the players, establishing the new state of the art.

We study an algorithmic equivalence technique between non-convex gradient descent and convex mirror descent.

We show that, for any sufficiently small fixed $\epsilon > 0$, when both players in a general-sum two-player (bimatrix) game employ optimistic mirror descent (OMD) with smooth regularization, learning rate $\eta = O(\epsilon^2)$ and $T = \Omega(poly(1/\epsilon))$ repetitions, either the dynamics reach an $\epsilon$-approximate Nash equilibrium (NE), or the average correlated distribution of play is an $\Omega(poly(\epsilon))$-strong coarse correlated equilibrium (CCE): any possible unilateral deviation does not only leave the player worse, but will decrease its utility by $\Omega(poly(\epsilon))$. As an immediate consequence, when the iterates of OMD are bounded away from being Nash equilibria in a bimatrix game, we guarantee convergence to an \emph{exact} CCE after only $O(1)$ iterations. Our results reveal that uncoupled no-regret learning algorithms can converge to CCE in general-sum games remarkably faster than to NE in, for example, zero-sum games. To establish this, we show that when OMD does not reach arbitrarily close to a NE, the (cumulative) regret of both players is not only negative, but decays linearly with time. Given that regret is the canonical measure of performance in online learning, our results suggest that cycling behavior of no-regret learning algorithms in games can be justified in terms of efficiency.

We study online convex optimization on $\ell_p$-balls in $\mathbb{R}^d$ for $p > 2$. While always sub-linear, the optimal regret exhibits a shift between the high-dimensional setting ($d > T$), when the dimension $d$ is greater than the time horizon $T$ and the low-dimensional setting ($d \leq T$). We show that Follow-the-Regularised-Leader (FTRL) with time-varying regularisation which is adaptive to the dimension regime is anytime optimal for all dimension regimes. Motivated by this, we ask whether it is possible to obtain anytime optimality of FTRL with fixed non-adaptive regularisation. Our main result establishes that for separable regularisers, adaptivity in the regulariser is necessary, and that any fixed regulariser will be sub-optimal in one of the two dimension regimes. Finally, we provide lower bounds which rule out sub-linear regret bounds for the linear bandit problem in sufficiently high-dimension for all $\ell_p$-balls with $p \geq 1$.