Approximate Function Evaluation via Multi-Armed Bandits
Tavor Z. Baharav, Gary Cheng, Mert Pilanci, David Tse
Abstract
We study the problem of estimating the value of a known smooth function f at an unknown point $\mu \in \mathbb{R}^n$, where each component $\mu_i$ can be sampled via a noisy oracle. Sampling more frequently components of $\mu$ corresponding to directions of the function with larger directional derivatives is more sample-efficient. However, as $\mu$ is unknown, the optimal sampling frequencies are also unknown. We design an instance-adaptive algorithm that learns to sample according to the importance of each coordinate, and with probability at least $1-\delta$ returns an $\epsilon$ accurate estimate of $f(\mu)$. We generalize our algorithm to adapt to heteroskedastic noise, and prove asymptotic optimality when f is linear. We corroborate our theoretical results with numerical experiments, showing the dramatic gains afforded by adaptivity.
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v151-baharav22a,
title = { Approximate Function Evaluation via Multi-Armed Bandits },
author = {Baharav, Tavor Z. and Cheng, Gary and Pilanci, Mert and Tse, David},
booktitle = {Proceedings of The 25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
pages = {108--135},
year = {2022},
editor = {Camps-Valls, Gustau and Ruiz, Francisco J. R. and Valera, Isabel},
volume = {151},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {28--30 Mar},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v151/baharav22a/baharav22a.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v151/baharav22a.html},
abstract = { We study the problem of estimating the value of a known smooth function f at an unknown point $\mu \in \mathbb{R}^n$, where each component $\mu_i$ can be sampled via a noisy oracle. Sampling more frequently components of $\mu$ corresponding to directions of the function with larger directional derivatives is more sample-efficient. However, as $\mu$ is unknown, the optimal sampling frequencies are also unknown. We design an instance-adaptive algorithm that learns to sample according to the importance of each coordinate, and with probability at least $1-\delta$ returns an $\epsilon$ accurate estimate of $f(\mu)$. We generalize our algorithm to adapt to heteroskedastic noise, and prove asymptotic optimality when f is linear. We corroborate our theoretical results with numerical experiments, showing the dramatic gains afforded by adaptivity. }
}