Paper:
Fighting Bandits with a New Kind of Smoothness
We provide a new analysis framework for the adversarial multi-armed bandit problem. Using the notion of convex smoothing, we define a novel family of algorithms with minimax optimal regret guarantees. First, we show that regularization via the Tsallis entropy, which includes EXP3 as a special case, matches the O( p NT ) minimax regret with a smaller constant factor. Second, we show that a wide class of perturbation methods achieve a near-optimal regret as low as O( p NT log N ), as long as the perturbation distribution has a bounded hazard function. For example, the Gumbel, Weibull, Frechet, Pareto, and Gamma distributions all satisfy this key property and lead to near-optimal algorithms.

Review:
The paper considers the classic problem of multi-armed bandits and extends the algorithmic framework of "gradient-based prediction algorithms" (GBPA) to this setting. In this framework, the learner uses a convex potential function to measure its own performance and predicts according to the gradient of the potential function evaluated at the current state. The main result in the current paper is a sufficient condition on the potential function so that it guarantees near-optimal regret bounds in the multi-armed bandit problem, assuming that the learner estimates the losses by the standard importance-weighting technique. Based on this result, two further results are derived: an order-optimal learning algorithm based on running FTRL (Follow-the-Regularized-Leader) with the Tsallis entropy as a regularizer and a sufficient condition for the perturbation distribution in FPL (Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader) to give near-optimal performance guarantees.The main result and its consequences contribute greatly to the literature on multi-armed bandits: Such an easily verifyable sufficient condition on the regularization functions and the perturbation distributions were highly sought for by many researchers. The contributions of the current paper make the relatively scattered picture of existing results on bandits much clearer. The writing and the technical quality are both excellent, which, together with the strength of the results, make this a very good paper overall.There are, however, a few minor mistakes that need to be fixed before the paper is published. First, the authors argue that the PolyINF algorithm of Audibert and Bubeck (2009) is "completely different" from gradient-based methods. This, however, is not true: as shown by Audibert, Lugosi and Bubeck (2014, MOR), PolyINF is actually an instance of mirror descent with a polynomial regularizer. Actually, it turns out that the regularizer used by Audibert et al. is the same (up to an additive constant) as the Tsallis entropy as proposed in the current paper. Nevertheless, the analysis presented in the current paper is more elegant in many respects, in that it reveals a close connection between Exp3 and the algorithm giving optimal bounds. The authors also claim an improvement in the best known constant factors, this is actually not true: the leading constant of Audibert et al. is actually better (although this issue can be fixed, see below). All in all, the presentation in the current submission needs to be modified a bit to highlight these connections.A closer examination of the proofs reveals that the regret bounds presented in the paper can be improved by at least a factor of \sqrt{2}. This factor is lost in the inequality on line 207, where C/2 is upper-bounded by C (and \ell_i^2 is bounded by 1). Propagating this lost factor into Theorems 2.3 and 3.1 improves the bounds derived for Exp3 and PolyINF to match the best known regret bounds for the respective algorithms (see, e.g., the monograph by Bubeck and Cesa-Bianchi, 2012 and the paper of Audibert, Bubeck and Lugosi, 2014).A minor annoyance in the presentation that while the authors claim to study the loss game, they actually study the gain game with negative gains and aim to maximize the sum of these negative gains. To me, this was often the source of confusion, as a loss should always be intuitively minimized and not maximized as often referred to in the paper (e.g., in Eq. 3 and the following paragraphs). I suggest that the authors refer to gains throughout the paper, reminding the reader that the proofs only work for non-positive gains. (Alternatively, conduct the analysis with non-negative losses. However, this seems to be rather tedious as it gives rise to a bunch of confusing minus signs everywhere in the paper.)Detailed comments ----------------- 087: "and associated bound" -> "and the associated bound"? 088: "That is, noise must satisfy" -> "Precisely, we show that the noise must satisfy"? 107: "Nature's choices [...] are assumed deterministic throughout." -- Can you clarify this? Does this mean that nature fixes the loss vectors in the beginning of the game (i.e., obliviously) or can be a deterministic function of the past plays of the learner? Is there any particular reason to make this assumption? 119: What does "chosen (but fixed)" precisely mean? 122: What is i here? 126: This would be the right time to note that PolyINF is also closely related. (Actually, it is not FTRL but mirror descent. I think it should be easy to show that for this particular regularizer, MD and FTRL are identical on the simplex, as can be done for the negative Shannon entropy.) 132: I mostly buy this argument about the fluctuations of the loss estimates, but note that the estimates need not be unbiased for good performance. In fact, algorithms that give high-probability bounds all use biased estimates. Also, "O(1/p)" should be "\Theta(1/p)". 156: This proof is a bit too sketchy, and referring to "GBPA run without the estimation step" is rather confusing. Besides Abernethy et al. (2012), Jan Poland's work "FPL analysis for adaptive bandits" (2005, TCS tech. report) also does a great job in explaining this step (and is also a relevant reference for following the perturbed leader in bandit problems). 161: "i_1,...,i_t" -> "i_1,...,i_{t-1}"? 170: "hessian" -> "Hessian" 184: "Then divergence penalty" -> "Then, the divergence penalty"? 192: "i_t is conditionally independent given \hat{L}" -- I am not sure what you mean here. I think it should be more important to note here that i_t is distributed as \nabla\tilde\Phi(\hat{L}). Also, some hats and tilde's are missing in this line. 218: "and it was not until [...] did the authors obtain" -> "and it was not until [...] that the authors obtained"? 225 vs 244: sup vs max? 268: \eta is not part of the regularizer and should not show up here. On the other hand, \tilde{\Phi} should be defined as \eta S + I instead of S + I for everything to check out. 290: This section could use a short introduction to be on par with the previous one. 300: The passage about swapping the order of differentiation and integration comes before differentiation is mentioned at all. Also, \tilde\Phi should be replaced by \nabla\tilde\Phi here. 304 and 305: ">" -> "\ge" would be more consistent with the final expression. Also, technically this expression is a subgradient, as for some specific perturbation distributions, a tie between arms may arise with positive probability. 350: I suppose that "(sup h_D)" refers to the supremum of h_D over its domain, but this is not entirely clear (and Appendix B seems to suggest otherwise). 451 and 477: missing years. 473 and 475: "Boltzmann-Gibbs" and "Monte Carlo". 497 and 500: missing parens. 506 and 509: missing \nabla from the last terms.bonus remark: I don't like the title -- I first thought that "Fighting bandits" is yet another derivative bandit setting. "A new kind of smoothness" sounds good though.