Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

On Private and Robust Bandits

Yulian Wu · Xingyu Zhou · Youming Tao · Di Wang

Great Hall & Hall B1+B2 (level 1) #1011
[ ]
[ Paper [ Slides [ Poster [ OpenReview
Thu 14 Dec 8:45 a.m. PST — 10:45 a.m. PST

Abstract: We study private and robust multi-armed bandits (MABs), where the agent receives Huber's contaminated heavy-tailed rewards and meanwhile needs to ensure differential privacy. We consider both the finite $k$-th raw moment and the finite $k$-th central moment settings for heavy-tailed rewards distributions with $k\ge 2$. We first present its minimax lower bound, characterizing the information-theoretic limit of regret with respect to privacy budget, contamination level, and heavy-tailedness. Then, we propose a meta-algorithm that builds on a private and robust mean estimation sub-routine \texttt{PRM} that essentially relies on reward truncation and the Laplace mechanism. For the above two different heavy-tailed settings, we give corresponding schemes of \texttt{PRM}, which enable us to achieve nearly-optimal regrets. Moreover, our two proposed truncation-based or histogram-based \texttt{PRM} schemes achieve the optimal trade-off between estimation accuracy, privacy and robustness. Finally, we support our theoretical results and show the effectiveness of our algorithms with experimental studies.

Chat is not available.