arXiv Machine Learning

Optimal No-Regret Learning for Repeated Prophet Inequality

The paper presents an efficient algorithm for repeated prophet inequalities with prefix feedback, achieving “~O(√T) expected regret”. It uses empirical backward induction, box‑specific reach bonuses, and a relative‑drop aggregation rule to eliminate polynomial dependence on the number of boxes. This resolves an open question from Liu et al. (2025).

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 2

Tight Lower Bounds for the Multi-Secretary Problem via Bellman Certificates

This paper studies additive regret in the multi-secretary problem, defined as the gap between the expected offline prophet reward and the reward of the best online policy. Prior work established \(O(\log T)\) regret for bounded-density distributions with connected support and \(O((\log T)^2)\) upper bounds for bounded-density distributions with support gaps.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

Constant regret in general games via higher-order optimism

The paper presents an uncoupled learning algorithm, higher-order optimism with discounting (HOOD), for arbitrary N-player normal form games with up to K actions per player. HOOD achieves an individual regret bound of O(N³ log² K) uniformly over the play horizon by combining a discounted (N+1)-th order predictor with entropic regularization over a lifted strategy space. This design mitigates large oscillations in play, addressing a key challenge in prior attempts to attain constant regret in general games.

By Omar Abbadi, Rida Laraki, Panayotis Mertikopoulos