Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much of the work in online learning focuses on the study of sublinear upper bounds on the regret. In this work, we initiate the study of best-case lower bounds in online convex optimization, wherein we bound the largest improvement an algorithm can obtain relative to the single best action in hindsight. This problem is motivated by the goal of better understanding the adaptivity of a learning algorithm. Another motivation comes from fairness: it is known that best-case lower bounds are instrumental in obtaining algorithms for decision-theoretic online learning (DTOL) that satisfy a notion of group fairness. Our contributions are a general method to provide best-case lower bounds in Follow the Regularized Leader (FTRL) algorithms with time-varying regularizers, which we use to show that best-case lower bounds are of the same order as existing upper regret bounds: this includes situations with a fixed learning rate, decreasing learning rates, timeless methods, and adaptive gradient methods. In stark contrast, we show that the linearized version of FTRL can attain negative linear regret. Finally, in DTOL with two experts and binary losses, we fully characterize the best-case sequences, which provides a finer understanding of the best-case lower bounds.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it