Online Long-run Constrained Optimization

A novel Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader type algorithm is proposed and analyzed for solving general long-term constrained optimization problems in online manner, where the objective and constraints are arbitrarily generated and not necessarily convex. In each period, random linear perturbation and strongly concave perturbation are incorporated in primal and dual directions, respectively, to the offline oracle, and a global minimax point is searched as the solution. Based on a proposed expected static cumulative regret, we derive the first sublinear $O(T^{8/9})$ regret complexity for this class of problems. The proposed algorithm is applied to tackle a long-term (extreme value) constrained river pollutant source identification problem, validate the theoretical results and exhibit superior performance compared to existing methods.