This paper addresses tracking of a moving target in a multi-agent network. The target follows a linear dynamics corrupted by an adversarial noise, i.e., the noise is not generated from a statistical distribution. The location of the target at each time induces a global time-varying loss function, and the global loss is a sum of local losses, each of which is associated to one agent. Agents noisy observations could be nonlinear. We formulate this problem as a distributed online optimization where agents communicate with each other to track the minimizer of the global loss. We then propose a decentralized version of the Mirror Descent algorithm and provide the non-asymptotic analysis of the problem. Using the notion of dynamic regret, we measure the performance of our algorithm versus its offline counterpart in the centralized setting. We prove that the bound on dynamic regret scales inversely in the network spectral gap, and it represents the adversarial noise causing deviation with respect to the linear dynamics. Our result subsumes a number of results in the distributed optimization literature. Finally, in a numerical experiment, we verify that our algorithm can be simply implemented for multi-agent tracking with nonlinear observations.
Between Stochastic and Adversarial Online Convex Optimization: Improved Regret Bounds via Smoothness
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics（科尔特韦格-德弗里斯数学研究所）；University of Twente（特文特大学）；Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教大学）
Google AI Princeton（谷歌AI普林斯顿）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering（阿伦计算机科学与工程学院）
Online Robust Subspace Tracking from Partial Information
Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
