重尾线性多臂老板:对抗鲁棒性、最佳兼顾,以及更远的目标
摘要
heavy-tailed bandits has been extensively studied since the seminal work of \citet{Bubeck2012BanditsWH}. In particular, heavy-tailed linear bandits, enabling efficient learning with both a large number of arms and heavy-tailed noises, have recently attracted significant attention \citep{ShaoYKL18,XueWWZ20,ZhongHYW21,Wang2025heavy,tajdini2025improved}. However, prior studies focus almost exclusively on stochastic regimes, with few exceptions limited to the special case of heavy-tailed multi-armed bandits(MABs) \citep{Huang0H22,ChengZ024,Chen2024uniINF}. In this work, we propose a general framework for adversarial heavy-tailed bandit problems, which performs follow-the-regularized-leader(FTRL) over the loss estimates shifted by a bonus function. Via a delicate setup of the bonus function, we devise the first FTRL-type best-of-both-worlds(BOBW) algorithm for heavy-tailed MABs, which does not require the truncated non-negativity assumption and achieves an worst-case regret in the adversarial regime as well as an gap-dependent regret in the stochastic regime. We then extend our framework to the linear case, proposing the first algorithm for adversarial heavy-tailed linear bandits with finite arm sets. This algorithm achieves an regret, matching the best-known worst-case regret bound in stochastic regimes. Moreover, we propose a general data-dependent learning rate, termed \textit{heavy-tailed noise aware stability-penalty matching}(HT-SPM)。 We prove that HT-SPM guarantees BOBW regret bounds for general heavy-tailed bandit problems once certain conditions are satisfied. By using HT-SPM and, in particular, a variance-reduced linear loss estimator, we obtain the first BOBW result for heavy-tailed linear bandits.
引用
@article{arxiv.2508.13679,
title = {Heavy-tailed Linear Bandits: Adversarial Robustness, Best-of-both-worlds, and Beyond},
author = {Canzhe Zhao and Shinji Ito and Shuai Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.13679},
year = {2025}
}