English

Prospective Learning in Retrospect

Machine Learning 2025-11-13 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

In most real-world applications of artificial intelligence, the distributions of the data and the goals of the learners tend to change over time. The Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning framework, which underpins most machine learning algorithms, fails to account for dynamic data distributions and evolving objectives, often resulting in suboptimal performance. Prospective learning is a recently introduced mathematical framework that overcomes some of these limitations. We build on this framework to present preliminary results that improve the algorithm and numerical results, and extend prospective learning to sequential decision-making scenarios, specifically foraging. Code is available at: https://github.com/neurodata/prolearn2.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.07965,
  title  = {Prospective Learning in Retrospect},
  author = {Yuxin Bai and Cecelia Shuai and Ashwin De Silva and Siyu Yu and Pratik Chaudhari and Joshua T. Vogelstein},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.07965},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted to AGI 2025

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:55:11.912Z