Pairwise learning refers to learning tasks where the loss function depends on a pair of instances.

Pairwise learning refers to learning tasks where the loss function depends on a pair of instances. A popular approach to handle streaming data in pairwise learning is an online gradient descent (OGD) algorithm, where one needs to pair the current instance with a buffering set of previous instances with a sufficiently large size and therefore suffers from a scalability issue. In this paper, we propose simple stochastic and online gradient descent methods for pairwise learning. A notable difference from the existing studies is that we only pair the current instance with the previous one in building a gradient direction, which is efficient in both the storage and computational complexity. We develop novel stability results, optimization, and generalization error bounds for both convex and nonconvex as well as both smooth and nonsmooth problems.

Online learning is a powerful tool for analyzing iterative algorithms. However, the classic adversarial setup sometimes fails to capture certain regularity in online problems in practice. Motivated by this, we establish a new setup, called Continuous Online Learning (COL), where the gradient of online loss function changes continuously across rounds with respect to the learner's decisions. We show that COL covers and more appropriately describes many interesting applications, from general equilibrium problems (EPs) to optimization in episodic MDPs. Using this new setup, we revisit the difficulty of achieving sublinear dynamic regret. We prove that there is a fundamental equivalence between achieving sublinear dynamic regret in COL and solving certain EPs, and we present a reduction from dynamic regret to both static regret and convergence rate of the associated EP. At the end, we specialize these new insights into online imitation learning and show improved understanding of its learning stability.