paper

Fast UCB-type algorithms for stochastic bandits with heavy and super heavy symmetric noise

Yuriy Dorn, Aleksandr Katrutsa, Ilgam Latypov, Andrey Pudovikov

arXiv:2402.07062GitHub

Cite this publication

Fast UCB-type algorithms for stochastic bandits with heavy and super heavy symmetric noise

@inproceedings{dorn2025-fast-ucb,
  title     = {Fast UCB-type algorithms for stochastic bandits with heavy and super heavy symmetric noise},
  author    = {Yuriy Dorn and Aleksandr Katrutsa and Ilgam Latypov and Andrey Pudovikov},
  year      = {2025},
  booktitle = {AAMAS 2025},
  eprint    = {2402.07062},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url       = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07062}
}

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In this study, we propose a new method for constructing UCB-type algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits based on general convex optimization methods with an inexact oracle. We derive the regret bounds corresponding to the convergence rates of the optimization methods. We propose a new algorithm Clipped-SGD-UCB and show, both theoretically and empirically, that in the case of symmetric noise in the reward, we can achieve an O(log⁡TKTlog⁡T)O(\log T\sqrt{KT\log T}) regret bound instead of O(T11+αKα1+α)O\left (T^{\frac{1}{1+\alpha}} K^{\frac{\alpha}{1+\alpha}} \right) for the case when the reward distribution satisfies EX∈D[∣X∣1+α]≤σ1+α(α∈(0,1])\mathbb{E}_{X \in D}[|X|^{1+\alpha}] \leq \sigma^{1+\alpha} (\alpha \in (0, 1]), i.e. perform better than it is assumed by the general lower bound for bandits with heavy-tails. Moreover, the same bound holds even when the reward distribution does not have the expectation, that is, when α<0\alpha < 0.