swap regret
Testable and Actionable Calibration for Full Swap Regret
Bairaktari, Konstantina, Hu, Lunjia, Nguyen, Huy L., Ullman, Jonathan
AI generated predictions increasingly inform decision making in critical tasks, and therefore must be trustworthy. One widely used measure of trustworthiness is calibration, which requires that the predictions match the true frequencies and can be treated like real probabilities of a given outcome. However, defining calibration is subtle, and designing good measures of calibration error has been an active topic of recent research. The first goal is to find calibration measures that are actionable, meaning they can inform decision makers about their utility loss when predictions are treated as true probabilities, which is known as swap regret. The second goal is to find calibration measures that are testable, meaning that calibration error can be measured from a small sample of predictions and outcomes. Although these are very basic requirements, there is no existing calibration measure that fully satisfies both properties, and all existing measures relax actionability by bounding a weaker notion of swap regret, or relax testability by having suboptimal estimation error. We introduce a new calibration measure, Soft-Binned Calibration Decision Loss (SCDL), which we prove is fully actionable without weakening either requirement, and testable with nearly optimal error rate. In addition, SCDL satisfies other desired properties such as continuity and consistency. We also provide a set of experiments confirming that the theoretical advantages of SCDL compared to other measures lead to better performance in practice.
Uncoupled Learning Dynamics with O(log T) Swap Regret in Multiplayer Games
In this paper we establish efficient and uncoupled learning dynamics so that, when employed by all players in a general-sum multiplayer game, the swap regret of each player after T repetitions of the game is bounded by O(logT), improving over the prior best bounds of O(log4(T)). At the same time, we guarantee optimal O( T) swap regret in the adversarial regime as well. To obtain these results, our primary contribution is to show that when all players follow our dynamics with a time-invariant learning rate, the second-order path lengths of the dynamics up to time T are bounded by O(logT), a fundamental property which could have further implications beyond near-optimally bounding the (swap) regret. Our proposed learning dynamics combine in a novel way optimistic regularized learning with the use of self-concordant barriers. Further, our analysis is remarkably simple, bypassing the cumbersome framework of higher-order smoothness recently developed by Daskalakis, Fishelson, and Golowich (NeurIPS'21).
Online Learning with Transductive Regret
We study online learning with the general notion of transductive regret, that is regret with modification rules applying to expert sequences (as opposed to single experts) that are representable by weighted finite-state transducers. We show how transductive regret generalizes existing notions of regret, including: (1) external regret; (2) internal regret; (3) swap regret; and (4) conditional swap regret. We present a general and efficient online learning algorithm for minimizing transductive regret. We further extend that to design efficient algorithms for the time-selection and sleeping expert settings. A by-product of our study is an algorithm for swap regret, which, under mild assumptions, is more efficient than existing ones, and a substantially more efficient algorithm for time selection swap regret.
Near-OptimalNo-RegretLearningDynamicsfor GeneralConvexGames
A recent line of work has established uncoupled learning dynamics such that, when employed by all players in a game, each player's regret after T repetitions grows polylogarithmically in T, an exponential improvement over the traditional guarantees within the no-regret framework. However, so far these results have only been limited to certain classes of games with structured strategy spaces--such as normal-form and extensive-form games. The question as to whether O(polylogT) regret bounds can be obtained for general convex and compact strategy sets--which occur in many fundamental models in economics and multiagent systems--while retaining efficient strategy updates is an importantquestion.
Scale-Invariant Fast Convergence in Games
Tsuchiya, Taira, Luo, Haipeng, Ito, Shinji
Scale-invariance in games has recently emerged as a widely valued desirable property. Yet, almost all fast convergence guarantees in learning in games require prior knowledge of the utility scale. To address this, we develop learning dynamics that achieve fast convergence while being both scale-free, requiring no prior information about utilities, and scale-invariant, remaining unchanged under positive rescaling of utilities. For two-player zero-sum games, we obtain scale-free and scale-invariant dynamics with external regret bounded by $\tilde{O}(A_{\mathrm{diff}})$, where $A_{\mathrm{diff}}$ is the payoff range, which implies an $\tilde{O}(A_{\mathrm{diff}} / T)$ convergence rate to Nash equilibrium after $T$ rounds. For multiplayer general-sum games with $n$ players and $m$ actions, we obtain scale-free and scale-invariant dynamics with swap regret bounded by $O(U_{\mathrm{max}} \log T)$, where $U_{\mathrm{max}}$ is the range of the utilities, ignoring the dependence on the number of players and actions. This yields an $O(U_{\mathrm{max}} \log T / T)$ convergence rate to correlated equilibrium. Our learning dynamics are based on optimistic follow-the-regularized-leader with an adaptive learning rate that incorporates the squared path length of the opponents' gradient vectors, together with a new stopping-time analysis that exploits negative terms in regret bounds without scale-dependent tuning. For general-sum games, scale-free learning is enabled also by a technique called doubling clipping, which clips observed gradients based on past observations.
Near-optimal Swap Regret Minimization for Convex Losses
Hu, Lunjia, Schneider, Jon, Wu, Yifan
We give a randomized online algorithm that guarantees near-optimal $\widetilde O(\sqrt T)$ expected swap regret against any sequence of $T$ adaptively chosen Lipschitz convex losses on the unit interval. This improves the previous best bound of $\widetilde O(T^{2/3})$ and answers an open question of Fishelson et al. [2025b]. In addition, our algorithm is efficient: it runs in $\mathsf{poly}(T)$ time. A key technical idea we develop to obtain this result is to discretize the unit interval into bins at multiple scales of granularity and simultaneously use all scales to make randomized predictions, which we call multi-scale binning and may be of independent interest. A direct corollary of our result is an efficient online algorithm for minimizing the calibration error for general elicitable properties. This result does not require the Lipschitzness assumption of the identification function needed in prior work, making it applicable to median calibration, for which we achieve the first $\widetilde O(\sqrt T)$ calibration error guarantee.