Federated Linear Bandits with Finite Adversarial Actions

Li Fan, Ruida Zhou, Chao Tian, Cong Shen

Keywords: Federated bandits, contextual bandits, regret analysis

TL;DR: We propose new federated linear bandits algorithms that achieve minimax lower bound with sublinear communication cost with finite adversarial action sets that may be different across clients.

Abstract: We study a federated linear bandits model, where $M$ clients communicate with a central server to solve a linear contextual bandits problem with finite adversarial action sets that may be different across clients. To address the unique challenges of **adversarial finite** action sets, we propose the FedSupLinUCB algorithm, which extends the principles of SupLinUCB and OFUL algorithms in linear contextual bandits. We prove that FedSupLinUCB achieves a total regret of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{d T})$, where $T$ is the total number of arm pulls from all clients, and $d$ is the ambient dimension of the linear model. This matches the minimax lower bound and thus is order-optimal (up to polylog terms). We study both asynchronous and synchronous cases and show that the communication cost can be controlled as $O(d M^2 \log(d)\log(T))$ and $O(\sqrt{d^3 M^3} \log(d))$, respectively. The FedSupLinUCB design is further extended to two scenarios: (1) variance-adaptive, where a total regret of $\tilde{O} (\sqrt{d \sum \nolimits_{t=1}^{T} \sigma_t^2})$ can be achieved with $\sigma_t^2$ being the noise variance of round $t$; and (2) adversarial corruption, where a total regret of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{dT} + d C_p)$ can be achieved with $C_p$ being the total corruption budget. Experiment results corroborate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of \alg on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Submission Number: 13584