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Frontiers of Computer Science

ISSN 2095-2228

ISSN 2095-2236(Online)

CN 10-1014/TP

Postal Subscription Code 80-970

2018 Impact Factor: 1.129

Front. Comput. Sci.    2021, Vol. 15 Issue (5) : 155404    https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-020-9519-9
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Follow the perturbed approximate leader for solving semi-bandit combinatorial optimization
Feidiao YANG1,2, Wei CHEN3, Jialin ZHANG1,2, Xiaoming SUN1,2()
1. Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Bejing 100190, China
2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
3. Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing 100080, China
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Abstract

Combinatorial optimization in the face of uncertainty is a challenge in both operational research and machine learning. In this paper, we consider a special and important class called the adversarial online combinatorial optimization with semi-bandit feedback, in which a player makes combinatorial decisions and gets the corresponding feedback repeatedly. While existing algorithms focus on the regret guarantee or assume there exists an efficient offline oracle, it is still a challenge to solve this problem efficiently if the offline counterpart is NP-hard. In this paper, we propose a variant of the Followthe-Perturbed-Leader (FPL) algorithm to solve this problem. Unlike the existing FPL approach, our method employs an approximation algorithm as an offline oracle and perturbs the collected data by adding nonnegative random variables. Our approach is simple and computationally efficient. Moreover, it can guarantee a sublinear (1+ ε)-scaled regret of order O(T23) for any small ε>0 for an important class of combinatorial optimization problems that admit an FPTAS (fully polynomial time approximation scheme), in which Tis the number of rounds of the learning process. In addition to the theoretical analysis, we also conduct a series of experiments to demonstrate the performance of our algorithm.

Keywords online learning      online combinatorial optimization      semi-bandit      follow-the-perturbed-leader     
Corresponding Author(s): Xiaoming SUN   
Just Accepted Date: 30 July 2020   Issue Date: 30 August 2021
 Cite this article:   
Feidiao YANG,Wei CHEN,Jialin ZHANG, et al. Follow the perturbed approximate leader for solving semi-bandit combinatorial optimization[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2021, 15(5): 155404.
 URL:  
https://academic.hep.com.cn/fcs/EN/10.1007/s11704-020-9519-9
https://academic.hep.com.cn/fcs/EN/Y2021/V15/I5/155404
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