Data-dependent Bounds with $T$-Optimal Best-of-Both-Worlds Guarantees in Multi-Armed Bandits using Stability-Penalty Matching

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2502.08143
• Publication Date: 2025-01-01
• Authors: Nguyen, Quan; Ito, Shinji; Komiyama, Junpei; Mehta, Nishant A.
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Machine Learning; Machine Learning (cs.LG)

Existing data-dependent and best-of-both-worlds regret bounds for multi-armed bandits problems have limited adaptivity as they are either data-dependent but not best-of-both-worlds (BOBW), BOBW but not data-dependent or have sub-optimal $O(\sqrt{T\ln{T}})$ worst-case guarantee in the adversarial regime. To overcome these limitations, we propose real-time stability-penalty matching (SPM), a new method for obtaining regret bounds that are simultaneously data-dependent, best-of-both-worlds and $T$-optimal for multi-armed bandits problems. In particular, we show that real-time SPM obtains bounds with worst-case guarantees of order $O(\sqrt{T})$ in the adversarial regime and $O(\ln{T})$ in the stochastic regime while simultaneously being adaptive to data-dependent quantities such as sparsity, variations, and small losses. Our results are obtained by extending the SPM technique for tuning the learning rates in the follow-the-regularized-leader (FTRL) framework, which further indicates that the combination of SPM and FTRL is a promising approach for proving new adaptive bounds in online learning problems.