Online Learning with Stochastically Partitioning Experts

Puranjay Datta, Sharayu Moharir, Jaya Prakash Champati

Keywords: Online Learning, Prediction with Expert Advice, Branching experts

Abstract:

We study a variant of the experts problem in which new experts are revealed over time according to a stochastic process. The experts are represented by partitions of a hypercube $\mathbb{B}$ in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space. In each round, a point is drawn from $\mathbb{B}$ in an independent and identically distributed manner using an unknown distribution. For each chosen point, we draw $d$ orthogonal hyperplanes parallel to the $d$ faces of $\mathbb{B}$ passing through the point. The set of experts available in a round is the set of partitions of $\mathbb{B}$ created by
all the hyperplanes drawn up to that point. Losses are adversarial, and
the performance metrics of interest include expected regret and high probability bounds on the sample-path regret.
We propose a suitably adapted version of the Hedge algorithm called Hedge-G, which uses a constant learning rate and has $O(\sqrt{2^d T \log T})$ expected regret, which is order-optimal.
Further, we show that for Hedge-G, there exists a trade-off between choosing a learning rate that has optimal expected regret and a learning rate that leads to a high probability sample-path regret bound. We address this limitation by proposing AdaHedge-G, a variant of Hedge-G that uses an adaptive learning rate by tracking the loss of the experts revealed up to that round. AdaHedge-G simultaneously achieves $O(\log(\log T)\sqrt{ T \log T})$ expected regret and $O(\log T \sqrt{T \log T})$ sample-path regret, with probability at least $1-T^{-c}$, where $c > 0$ is a constant dependent on $d$.

Readers: auai.org/UAI/2025/Conference, auai.org/UAI/2025/Conference/Area_Chairs, auai.org/UAI/2025/Conference/Reviewers, auai.org/UAI/2025/Conference/Submission235/Authors, auai.org/UAI/2025/Conference/Submission235/Reproducibility_Reviewers

Submission Number: 235