Paper ID: 2305.08629

A Unified Analysis of Nonstochastic Delayed Feedback for Combinatorial Semi-Bandits, Linear Bandits, and MDPs

Dirk van der Hoeven, Lukas Zierahn, Tal Lancewicki, Aviv Rosenberg, Nicoló Cesa-Bianchi

We derive a new analysis of Follow The Regularized Leader (FTRL) for online learning with delayed bandit feedback. By separating the cost of delayed feedback from that of bandit feedback, our analysis allows us to obtain new results in three important settings. On the one hand, we derive the first optimal (up to logarithmic factors) regret bounds for combinatorial semi-bandits with delay and adversarial Markov decision processes with delay (and known transition functions). On the other hand, we use our analysis to derive an efficient algorithm for linear bandits with delay achieving near-optimal regret bounds. Our novel regret decomposition shows that FTRL remains stable across multiple rounds under mild assumptions on the Hessian of the regularizer.

Submitted: May 15, 2023