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1. Learning Strategy-Aware Linear Classifiers

   Chen, Yiling ; Liu, Yang ; Podimata, Chara ( January 2020 , Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   We address the question of repeatedly learning linear classifiers against agents who are \emph{strategically} trying to \emph{game} the deployed classifiers, and we use the \emph{Stackelberg regret} to measure the performance of our algorithms. First, we show that Stackelberg and external regret for the problem of strategic classification are \emph{strongly incompatible}: i.e., there exist worst-case scenarios, where \emph{any} sequence of actions providing \emph{sublinear} external regret might result in \emph{linear} Stackelberg regret and vice versa. Second, we present a strategy-aware algorithm for minimizing the Stackelberg regret for which we prove nearly matching upper and lower regret bounds. Finally, we provide simulations to complement our theoretical analysis. Our results advance the growing literature of learning from revealed preferences, which has so far focused on smoother'' assumptions from the perspective of the learner and the agents respectively. 

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2. The Strategic Perceptron

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3465456.3467629  

   Ahmadi, Saba ; Beyhaghi, Hedyeh ; Blum, Avrim ; Naggita, Keziah ( July 2021 , ACM Conference on Economics and Computation)

   null (Ed.)

   The classical Perceptron algorithm provides a simple and elegant procedure for learning a linear classifier. In each step, the algorithm observes the sample's position and label and updates the current predictor accordingly if it makes a mistake. However, in presence of strategic agents that desire to be classified as positive and that are able to modify their position by a limited amount, the classifier may not be able to observe the true position of agents but rather a position where the agent pretends to be. Unlike the original setting with perfect knowledge of positions, in this situation the Perceptron algorithm fails to achieve its guarantees, and we illustrate examples with the predictor oscillating between two solutions forever, making an unbounded number of mistakes even though a perfect large-margin linear classifier exists. Our main contribution is providing a modified Perceptron-style algorithm which makes a bounded number of mistakes in presence of strategic agents with both $\ell_2$ and weighted $\ell_1$ manipulation costs. In our baseline model, knowledge of the manipulation costs (i.e., the extent to which an agent may manipulate) is assumed. In our most general model, we relax this assumption and provide an algorithm which learns and refines both the classifier and its cost estimates to achieve good mistake bounds even when manipulation costs are unknown. 

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3. Robust Multi-Agent Bandits Over Undirected Graphs

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3570614  

   Vial, Daniel ; Shakkottai, Sanjay ; Srikant, R. ( December 2022 , Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems)

   We consider a multi-agent multi-armed bandit setting in which n honest agents collaborate over a network to minimize regret but m malicious agents can disrupt learning arbitrarily. Assuming the network is the complete graph, existing algorithms incur O((m + K/n) łog (T) / Δ ) regret in this setting, where K is the number of arms and Δ is the arm gap. For m łl K, this improves over the single-agent baseline regret of O(Kłog(T)/Δ). In this work, we show the situation is murkier beyond the case of a complete graph. In particular, we prove that if the state-of-the-art algorithm is used on the undirected line graph, honest agents can suffer (nearly) linear regret until time is doubly exponential in K and n . In light of this negative result, we propose a new algorithm for which the i -th agent has regret O(( dmal (i) + K/n) łog(T)/Δ) on any connected and undirected graph, where dmal(i) is the number of i 's neighbors who are malicious. Thus, we generalize existing regret bounds beyond the complete graph (where dmal(i) = m), and show the effect of malicious agents is entirely local (in the sense that only the dmal (i) malicious agents directly connected to i affect its long-term regret). 

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4. Strategic Classification under Unknown Personalized Manipulation

   Shao, Han ; Blum, Avrim ; Montasser, Omar ( December 2023 , Advances in neural information processing systems)

   We consider strategic classification, where agents can strategically manipulate their feature vector to a limited extent in order to be classified as positive. Unlike most prior work, our work considers manipulations to be personalized, meaning that agents can have different levels of manipulation abilities (e.g., varying radii for ball manipulations), and unknown to the learner. We formalize the learning problem in an interaction model where the learner first deploys a classifier and the agent manipulates the feature vector within their manipulation set to game the deployed classifier. We investigate various scenarios in terms of the information available to the learner during the interaction, such as observing the original feature vector before or after deployment, observing the manipulated feature vector, or not seeing either the original or the manipulated feature vector, and provide online mistake bounds and PAC sample complexity in these scenarios for ball manipulations. 

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5. Streaming algorithms for the missing item finding problem

   Stoeckl, Manuel ( January 2023 , SODA 2023)

   Many problems on data streams have been studied at two extremes of difficulty: either allowing randomized algorithms, in the static setting (where they should err with bounded probability on the worst case stream); or when only deterministic and infallible algorithms are required. Some recent works have considered the adversarial setting, in which a randomized streaming algorithm must succeed even on data streams provided by an adaptive adversary that can see the intermediate outputs of the algorithm. In order to better understand the differences between these models, we study a streaming task called “Missing Item Finding”. In this problem, for r < n, one is given a data stream a1 , . . . , ar of elements in [n], (possibly with repetitions), and must output some x ∈ [n] which does not equal any of the ai. We prove that, for r = nΘ(1) and δ = 1/poly(n), the space required for randomized algorithms that solve this problem in the static setting with error δ is Θ(polylog(n)); for algorithms in the adversarial setting with error δ, Θ((1 + r2/n)polylog(n)); and for deterministic algorithms, Θ(r/polylog(n)). Because our adversarially robust algorithm relies on free access to a string of O(r log n) random bits, we investigate a “random start” model of streaming algorithms where all random bits used are included in the space cost. Here we find a conditional lower bound on the space usage, which depends on the space that would be needed for a pseudo-deterministic algorithm to solve the problem. We also prove an Ω(r/polylog(n)) lower bound for the space needed by a streaming algorithm with < 1/2polylog(n) error against “white-box” adversaries that can see the internal state of the algorithm, but not predict its future random decisions. 

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