Federated Multi-Armed Bandits

Abstract

Federated multi-armed bandits (FMAB) is a new bandit paradigm that parallels the federated learning (FL) framework in supervised learning. It is inspired by practical applications in cognitive radio and recommender systems, and enjoys features that are analogous to FL. This paper proposes a general framework of FMAB and then studies two specific federated bandit models. We first study the approximate model where the heterogeneous local models are random realizations of the global model from an unknown distribution. This model introduces a new uncertainty of client sampling, as the global model may not be reliably learned even if the finite local models are perfectly known. Furthermore, this uncertainty cannot be quantified a priori without knowledge of the suboptimality gap. We solve the approximate model by proposing Federated Double UCB (Fed2-UCB), which constructs a novel "double UCB" principle accounting for uncertainties from both arm and client sampling. We show that gradually admitting new clients is critical in achieving an O(log(T)) regret while explicitly considering the communication cost. The exact model, where the global bandit model is the exact average of heterogeneous local models, is then studied as a special case. We show that, somewhat surprisingly, the order-optimal regret can be achieved independent of the number of clients with a careful choice of the update periodicity. Experiments using both synthetic and real-world datasets corroborate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.