  A key challenge in online learning is that classical algorithms can be slow
to adapt to changing environments. Recent studies have proposed "meta"
algorithms that convert any online learning algorithm to one that is adaptive
to changing environments, where the adaptivity is analyzed in a quantity called
the strongly-adaptive regret. This paper describes a new meta algorithm that
has a strongly-adaptive regret bound that is a factor of $\sqrt{\log(T)}$
better than other algorithms with the same time complexity, where $T$ is the
time horizon. We also extend our algorithm to achieve a first-order (i.e.,
dependent on the observed losses) strongly-adaptive regret bound for the first
time, to our knowledge. At its heart is a new parameter-free algorithm for the
learning with expert advice (LEA) problem in which experts sometimes do not
output advice for consecutive time steps (i.e., \emph{sleeping} experts). This
algorithm is derived by a reduction from optimal algorithms for the so-called
coin betting problem. Empirical results show that our algorithm outperforms
state-of-the-art methods in both learning with expert advice and metric
learning scenarios.
