Feature Priming in Online Linear Regression: Sparse-Regret Lower Bounds and a Tight Univariate Rate

Abstract

In high-dimensional online prediction, the best predictor may depend on only a few features, so regret should scale with sparsity rather than the ambient dimension. Feature priming pursues this goal by estimating feature weights from past data and refitting a minimum-norm predictor on the rescaled design. Warmuth and Amid asked at COLT 2023 whether any of three such rules admits a competitive online regret guarantee. Using the natural Moore--Penrose protocol based only on past data, we give a negative answer to the sparse-logarithmic form of this COLT open problem. Our analysis identifies a common obstruction: cheap nuisance interpolation causes the refit to underweight the truly predictive coordinate. An exact target-mass identity and a two-sign argument turn this effect into clipped prediction loss. Hadamard constructions force $\Omega(\min\{T,\sqrt{d}\})$ regret for all three rules against a zero-loss one-sparse comparator, with extensions to fixed prime powers and selectors among the rules. Conversely, regret is controlled by data rank, and a Euclidean-normalized triangular construction matches this dependence for powered univariate priming, even under nonnegative second-stage ridge regularization; a paired ridge construction also covers all three powered rules. Exploratory diagnostics on frozen language-model activations exhibit the same relation among nuisance interpolation, target weight, and loss. The exact multivariate and Pearson frontiers remain open.