Related papers: Multiple Random Oracles Are Better Than One

Are score function estimators an underestimated approach to learning with $k$-subset sampling? Sampling $k$-subsets is a fundamental operation in many machine learning tasks that is not amenable to differentiable parametrization, impeding…

The k-means method is a widely used clustering algorithm. One of its distinguished features is its speed in practice. Its worst-case running-time, however, is exponential, leaving a gap between practical and theoretical performance. Arthur…

Polynomial regression is a basic primitive in learning and statistics. In its most basic form the goal is to fit a degree $d$ polynomial to a response variable $y$ in terms of an $n$-dimensional input vector $x$. This is extremely…

A matrix $M: A \times X \rightarrow \{-1,1\}$ corresponds to the following learning problem: An unknown element $x \in X$ is chosen uniformly at random. A learner tries to learn $x$ from a stream of samples, $(a_1, b_1), (a_2, b_2) \ldots$,…

Let $\mathbb{F}_q$ be the finite field of size $q$ and let $\ell: \mathbb{F}_q^n \to \mathbb{F}_q$ be a linear function. We introduce the {\em Learning From Subset} problem LFS$(q,n,d)$ of learning $\ell$, given samples $u \in…

Many state-of-the-art algorithms for solving hard combinatorial problems in artificial intelligence (AI) include elements of stochasticity that lead to high variations in runtime, even for a fixed problem instance. Knowledge about the…

The k-means algorithm is a well-known method for partitioning n points that lie in the d-dimensional space into k clusters. Its main features are simplicity and speed in practice. Theoretically, however, the best known upper bound on its…

Many real-world problems require trading off multiple competing objectives. However, these objectives are often in different units and/or scales, which can make it challenging for practitioners to express numerical preferences over…

In this work, we investigate the problem of learning distance functions within the query-based learning framework, where a learner is able to pose triplet queries of the form: ``Is $x_i$ closer to $x_j$ or $x_k$?'' We establish formal…

This paper addresses the problem of sequential submodular maximization: selecting and ranking items in a sequence to optimize some composite submodular function. In contrast to most of the previous works, which assume access to the utility…

We prove that every bounded function $f:\{-1,1\}^n\to[-1,1]$ of degree at most $d$ can be learned with $L_2$-accuracy $\varepsilon$ and confidence $1-\delta$ from $\log(\tfrac{n}{\delta})\,\varepsilon^{-d-1} C^{d^{3/2}\sqrt{\log d}}$ random…

In this paper, we study an inverse reinforcement learning problem that involves learning the reward function of a learning agent using trajectory data collected while this agent is learning its optimal policy. To address this problem, we…

We study random knots, which we define as a triple of random periodic functions (where a random function is a random trigonometric series, \[f(\theta) = \sum_{k=1}^\infty a_k \cos (k \theta) +b_k (\sin k \theta),\] with $a_k, b_k$ are…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become an increasingly active area of research in recent years. Although there are many algorithms that allow an agent to solve tasks efficiently, they often ignore the possibility that prior experience…

We study a functional equation whose unknown maps a Euclidean space into the space of probability distributions on [0,1]. We prove existence and uniqueness of its solution under suitable regularity and boundary conditions, we show that it…

Learning a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is a fundamental problem in machine learning, learning theory, and statistics. One notion of learning a GMM is proper learning: here, the goal is to find a mixture of $k$ Gaussians $\mathcal{M}$ that…

Consider a set of multivariate distributions, $F_1,\dots,F_M$, aiming to explain the same phenomenon. For instance, each $F_m$ may correspond to a different candidate background model for calibration data, or to one of many possible signal…

We consider the problem of learning an unknown partition of an $n$ element universe using rank queries. Such queries take as input a subset of the universe and return the number of parts of the partition it intersects. We give a simple…

We study the problem of learning to cluster data points using an oracle which can answer same-cluster queries. Different from previous approaches, we do not assume that the total number of clusters is known at the beginning and do not…

A function f : {0, 1}^n -> {0, 1} is said to be k-monotone if it flips between 0 and 1 at most k times on every ascending chain. Such functions represent a natural generalization of (1-)monotone functions, and have been recently studied in…