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In the field of reinforcement learning there has been recent progress towards safety and high-confidence bounds on policy performance. However, to our knowledge, no practical methods exist for determining high-confidence policy performance…
We study a localized notion of uniform convergence known as an "optimistic rate" (Panchenko 2002; Srebro et al. 2010) for linear regression with Gaussian data. Our refined analysis avoids the hidden constant and logarithmic factor in…
Empirical risk minimization over classes functions that are bounded for some version of the variation norm has a long history, starting with Total Variation Denoising (Rudin et al., 1992), and has been considered by several recent articles,…
We provide a new understanding of the stochastic gradient bandit algorithm by showing that it converges to a globally optimal policy almost surely using \emph{any} constant learning rate. This result demonstrates that the stochastic…
We study online convex optimization under stochastic sub-gradient observation faults, where we introduce adaptive algorithms with minimax optimal regret guarantees. We specifically study scenarios where our sub-gradient observations can be…
We develop a formalism for constructing stochastic upper bounds on the expected full sample risk for supervised classification tasks via the Hilbert coresets approach within a transductive framework. We explicitly compute tight and…
Fitting a function by using linear combinations of a large number $N$ of `simple' components is one of the most fruitful ideas in statistical learning. This idea lies at the core of a variety of methods, from two-layer neural networks to…
Designing learning algorithms that are resistant to perturbations of the underlying data distribution is a problem of wide practical and theoretical importance. We present a general approach to this problem focusing on unsupervised…
Policy learning in modern operations environments faces a fundamental tension between limited operational data and the large, often continuous, state and action spaces over which good decisions must be identified and deployed. We study…
We study the common continual learning setup where an overparameterized model is sequentially fitted to a set of jointly realizable tasks. We analyze forgetting, defined as the loss on previously seen tasks, after $k$ iterations. For…
We consider linear prediction with a convex Lipschitz loss, or more generally, stochastic convex optimization problems of generalized linear form, i.e.~where each instantaneous loss is a scalar convex function of a linear function. We show…
Transfer learning seeks to accelerate sequential decision-making by leveraging offline data from related agents. However, data from heterogeneous sources that differ in observed features, distributions, or unobserved confounders often…
We establish empirical risk minimization principles for active learning by deriving a family of upper bounds on the generalization error. Aligning with empirical observations, the bounds suggest that superior query algorithms can be…
We propose a distributed algorithm based on Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) to minimize the sum of locally known convex functions using communication over a network. This optimization problem emerges in many applications…
We study square loss in a realizable time-series framework with martingale difference noise. Our main result is a fast rate excess risk bound which shows that whenever a trajectory hypercontractivity condition holds, the risk of the…
Limit distributions for the greatest convex minorant and its derivative are considered for a general class of stochastic processes including partial sum processes and empirical processes, for independent, weakly dependent and long range…
We consider the problem of stochastic convex optimization with exp-concave losses using Empirical Risk Minimization in a convex class. Answering a question raised in several prior works, we provide a $O( d / n + \log( 1 / \delta) / n )$…
This paper revisits a fundamental problem in statistical inference from a non-asymptotic theoretical viewpoint $\unicode{x2013}$ the construction of confidence sets. We establish a finite-sample bound for the estimator, characterizing its…
We consider a deep neural network estimator based on empirical risk minimization with l_1-regularization. We derive a general bound for its excess risk in regression and classification (including multiclass), and prove that it is adaptively…
We build a theoretical framework for designing and understanding practical meta-learning methods that integrates sophisticated formalizations of task-similarity with the extensive literature on online convex optimization and sequential…