Tri-Dung Nguyen

Le Cong Dinh, Tri-Dung Nguyen, Alain Zemkoho et al.

We study online learning problems in which the learner has extra knowledge about the adversary's behaviour, i.e., in game-theoretic settings where opponents typically follow some no-external regret learning algorithms. Under this assumption, we propose two new online learning algorithms, Accurate Follow the Regularized Leader (AFTRL) and Prod-Best Response (Prod-BR), that intensively exploit this extra knowledge while maintaining the no-regret property in the worst-case scenario of having inaccurate extra information. Specifically, AFTRL achieves $O(1)$ external regret or $O(1)$ \emph{forward regret} against no-external regret adversary in comparison with $O(\sqrt{T})$ \emph{dynamic regret} of Prod-BR. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first to consider forward regret that achieves $O(1)$ regret against strategic adversaries. When playing zero-sum games with Accurate Multiplicative Weights Update (AMWU), a special case of AFTRL, we achieve \emph{last round convergence} to the Nash Equilibrium. We also provide numerical experiments to further support our theoretical results. In particular, we demonstrate that our methods achieve significantly better regret bounds and rate of last round convergence, compared to the state of the art (e.g., Multiplicative Weights Update (MWU) and its optimistic counterpart, OMWU).

Marah-Lisanne Thormann, Phan Tu Vuong, Alain B. Zemkoho et al.

When datasets contain outliers, robust regression is a well-established alternative to Ordinary Least Squares. A commonly employed robust estimator is Least Trimmed Squares (LTS), which computes the regression coefficients from a subset of observations. Determining the exact solution corresponds to a combinatorial problem with prohibitive computational costs, even for instances of moderate dimension. Thus, the most prevalent approach in practice remains a heuristic known as Fast-LTS. Although the heuristic often performs effectively, certain elements of the approach remain open to improvement. In particular, its core procedure provides robust results only when initialized with a large number of starting points. To address the heuristic's limitations, this paper reformulates the LTS problem as a concave minimization problem subject to a capped simplex constraint, and proposes the successive Boosted Difference of Convex Functions Algorithm (sBDCA) as a solution method. Theoretically, we establish via the Łojasiewicz property that sBDCA converges to a local solution with a linear rate in the fastest case. To ensure robustness from a single initialization in practice, we derive and integrate a problem-specific preconditioning matrix into the algorithmic setup. Building on this theoretical foundation, we conduct numerical studies on various synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of sBDCA with preconditioning. Specifically, we show that our approach is up to 3.25 times faster than Fast-LTS and achieves up to 90% lower objective function values, particularly in high-dimensional settings. As all code is openly available, this paper further provides a practical guide to robust regression in Python.