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We show that any memory-constrained, first-order algorithm which minimizes $d$-dimensional, $1$-Lipschitz convex functions over the unit ball to $1/\mathrm{poly}(d)$ accuracy using at most $d^{1.25 - \delta}$ bits of memory must make at least $\Omega(d^{1 + (4/3)\delta})$ first-order queries (for any constant $\delta \in [0, 1/4]$). Consequently, the performance of such memory-constrained algorithms are a polynomial factor worse than the optimal $\tilde{O}(d)$ query bound for this problem obtained by cutting plane methods that use $\tilde{O}(d^2)$ memory. This resolves one of the open problems in the COLT 2019 open problem publication of Woodworth and Srebro.
We present new efficient \emph{projection-free} algorithms for online convex optimization (OCO), where by projection-free we refer to algorithms that avoid computing orthogonal projections onto the feasible set, and instead relay on different and potentially much more efficient oracles. While most state-of-the-art projection-free algorithms are based on the \emph{follow-the-leader} framework, our algorithms are fundamentally different and are based on the \emph{online gradient descent} algorithm with a novel and efficient approach to computing so-called \emph{infeasible projections}. As a consequence, we obtain the first projection-free algorithms which naturally yield \emph{adaptive regret} guarantees, i.e., regret bounds that hold w.r.t. any sub-interval of the sequence. Concretely, when assuming the availability of a linear optimization oracle (LOO) for the feasible set, on a sequence of length $T$, our algorithms guarantee $O(T^{3/4})$ adaptive regret and $O(T^{3/4})$ adaptive expected regret, for the full-information and bandit settings, respectively, using only $O(T)$ calls to the LOO. These bounds match the current state-of-the-art regret bounds for LOO-based projection-free OCO, which are \emph{not adaptive}. We also consider a new natural setting in which the feasible set is accessible through a separation oracle. We present algorithms which, using overall $O(T)$ calls to the separation oracle, guarantee $O(\sqrt{T})$ adaptive regret and $O(T^{3/4})$ adaptive expected regret for the full-information and bandit settings, respectively.
We study the subject of universal online learning with non-i.i.d. processes for bounded losses. The notion of universally consistent learning was defined by Hanneke in an effort to study learning theory under minimal assumptions, where the objective is to obtain low long-run average loss for any target function. We are interested in characterizing processes for which learning is possible and whether there exist learning rules guaranteed to be universally consistent given the only assumption that such learning is possible. The case of unbounded losses is very restrictive since the learnable processes almost surely have to visit a finite number of points and as a result, simple memorization is optimistically universal. We focus on the bounded setting and give a complete characterization of the processes admitting strong and weak universal learning. We further show that the k-nearest neighbor algorithm (kNN) is not optimistically universal and present a novel variant of 1NN which is optimistically universal for general input and value spaces in both strong and weak settings. This closes all the COLT 2021 open problems posed on universal online learning.