Self-normalized martingale inequalities lie at the heart of confidence ellipsoids for online least squares and, more broadly, many bandit and reinforcement-learning results. Yet existing vector and scalar results typically rely on bounded covariates and an explicit regularization matrix, producing bounds that are \emph{not scale-invariant}: although the self-normalized quantity is scale-invariant by definition, its standard upper bounds are not. We characterize when scale-invariant upper bounds on self-normalized martingales are possible. Without further assumptions, we prove that nontrivial scale-invariant bounds exist only in dimension $d=1$; moreover, in $d=1$ we obtain $O(\log T)$ scale-invariant self-normalized bounds without any assumptions on the covariates. In contrast, for $d>1$ we show that no nontrivial scale-invariant bound can hold in full generality. We then connect this dichotomy to \emph{doubly-uniform} regret in online linear regression (i.e., regret bounds that are simultaneously independent of the covariate scale and the comparator norm) and use it to resolve the open question of Gaillard, Gerchinovitz, Huard, and Stoltz, \emph{``Uniform regret bounds over $\mathbb{R}^d$ for the sequential linear regression problem with the square loss''} (ALT 2019): in $d=1$ we give an explicit algorithm with $O(\log T)$ doubly-uniform regret, whereas for $d>1$ sublinear doubly-uniform regret is impossible. Finally, under a natural \emph{smoothness} condition (bounded Radon--Nikodym derivatives of the conditional covariate laws with respect to a fixed base measure), we recover sublinear regret for $d>1$ without bounded covariates and derive a self-normalized concentration inequality free of the usual regularization penalties, yielding arguably a first natural scale-invariant bound for adaptive, non-i.i.d. vector martingales.

Offset Rademacher complexities have been shown to provide tight upper bounds for the square loss in a broad class of problems including improper statistical learning and online learning. We show that the offset complexity can be generalized to any loss that satisfies a certain general convexity condition. Further, we show that this condition is closely related to both exponential concavity and self-concordance, unifying apparently disparate results. By a novel geometric argument, many of our bounds translate to improper learning in a non-convex class with Audibert's star algorithm. Thus, the offset complexity provides a versatile analytic tool that covers both convex empirical risk minimization and improper learning under entropy conditions. Applying the method, we recover the optimal rates for proper and improper learning with the p-loss for 1

We study the fundamental problem of sequential probability assignment, also known as online learning with logarithmic loss, with respect to an arbitrary, possibly nonparametric hypothesis class. Our goal is to obtain a complexity measure for the hypothesis class that characterizes the minimax regret and to determine a general, minimax optimal algorithm. Notably, the sequential $\ell_{\infty}$ entropy, extensively studied in the literature (Rakhlin and Sridharan, 2015, Bilodeau et al., 2020, Wu et al., 2023), was shown to not characterize minimax regret in general. Inspired by the seminal work of Shtarkov (1987) and Rakhlin, Sridharan, and Tewari (2010), we introduce a novel complexity measure, the \emph{contextual Shtarkov sum}, corresponding to the Shtarkov sum after projection onto a multiary context tree, and show that the worst case log contextual Shtarkov sum equals the minimax regret. Using the contextual Shtarkov sum, we derive the minimax optimal strategy, dubbed \emph{contextual Normalized Maximum Likelihood} (cNML). Our results hold for sequential experts, beyond binary labels, which are settings rarely considered in prior work. To illustrate the utility of this characterization, we provide a short proof of a new regret upper bound in terms of sequential $\ell_{\infty}$ entropy, unifying and sharpening state-of-the-art bounds by Bilodeau et al. (2020) and Wu et al. (2023).

The developments of Rademacher complexity and PAC-Bayesian theory have been largely independent.

Quantile (and, more generally, KL) regret bounds, such as those achieved by NormalHedge (Chaudhuri, Freund, and Hsu 2009) and its variants, relax the goal of competing against the best individual expert to only competing against a majority of experts on adversarial data.

We also introduce anew on-average stability measure to develop optimistic bounds in a low noise setting.

We consider linear prediction with a convex Lipschitz loss, or more generally, stochastic convex optimization problems of generalized linear form, i.e.

Prediction with expert advice is perhaps the single most fundamental problem in online learning and sequential decision making.

We thank the reviewers for the positive comments and useful feedback. We provide responses to the main comments. Connections to Cotter et al: There are two main differences between our paper and Cotter et al. (2019a;b): Code: We will make Tensorflow code available. We will include a discussion on surrogates in Section 2. Non-Differentiable Constraints with Applications to Fairness, Recall, Churn, and Other Goals.