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Oracle-efficient Hybrid Learning with Constrained Adversaries

Machine Learning 2026-03-06 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

The Hybrid Online Learning Problem, where features are drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution but labels are generated adversarially, is a well-motivated setting positioned between statistical and fully-adversarial online learning. Prior work has presented a dichotomy: algorithms that are statistically-optimal, but computationally intractable (Wu et al., 2023), and algorithms that are computationally-efficient (given an ERM oracle), but statistically-suboptimal (Wu et al., 2024). This paper takes a significant step towards achieving statistical optimality and computational efficiency simultaneously in the Hybrid Learning setting. To do so, we consider a structured setting, where the Adversary is constrained to pick labels from an expressive, but fixed, class of functions RR. Our main result is a new learning algorithm, which runs efficiently given an ERM oracle and obtains regret scaling with the Rademacher complexity of a class derived from the Learner's hypothesis class HH and the Adversary's label class RR. As a key corollary, we give an oracle-efficient algorithm for computing equilibria in stochastic zero-sum games when action sets may be high-dimensional but the payoff function exhibits a type of low-dimensional structure. Technically, we develop a number of tools for the design and analysis of our learning algorithm, including a novel Frank-Wolfe reduction with "truncated entropy regularizer" and a new tail bound for sums of "hybrid" martingale difference sequences.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.04546,
  title  = {Oracle-efficient Hybrid Learning with Constrained Adversaries},
  author = {Princewill Okoroafor and Robert Kleinberg and Michael P. Kim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.04546},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:03:52.649Z