Related papers: Sharper lower bounds on the performance of the emp…
Minimizing the empirical risk is a popular training strategy, but for learning tasks where the data may be noisy or heavy-tailed, one may require many observations in order to generalize well. To achieve better performance under less…
Various algorithms in reinforcement learning exhibit dramatic variability in their convergence rates and ultimate accuracy as a function of the problem structure. Such instance-specific behavior is not captured by existing global minimax…
This paper provides a general technique for lower bounding the Bayes risk of statistical estimation, applicable to arbitrary loss functions and arbitrary prior distributions. A lower bound on the Bayes risk not only serves as a lower bound…
In this work we investigate to which extent one can recover class probabilities within the empirical risk minimization (ERM) paradigm. The main aim of our paper is to extend existing results and emphasize the tight relations between…
In this paper, we study the Empirical Risk Minimization problem in the non-interactive local model of differential privacy. In the case of constant or low dimensionality ($p\ll n$), we first show that if the ERM loss function is $(\infty,…
The generalization error (risk) of a supervised statistical learning algorithm quantifies its prediction ability on previously unseen data. Inspired by exponential tilting, \citet{li2020tilted} proposed the {\it tilted empirical risk} (TER)…
Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is typically designed to perform well on the average loss, which can result in estimators that are sensitive to outliers, generalize poorly, or treat subgroups unfairly. While many methods aim to address…
We investigate a sequential optimization procedure to minimize the empirical risk functional $f_{\hat\theta}(x) = \frac{1}{2}\|G_{\hat\theta}(x) - y\|^2$ for certain families of deep networks $G_{\theta}(x)$. The approach is to optimize a…
Learning methods are increasingly used to synthesize controllers from data, yet existing sample-complexity characterizations for continuous control are sharp only in the fully observed setting. This paper studies the partially observed case…
In a wide range of statistical learning problems such as ranking, clustering or metric learning among others, the risk is accurately estimated by $U$-statistics of degree $d\geq 1$, i.e. functionals of the training data with low variance…
This paper considers an empirical risk minimization problem under heavy-tailed settings, where data does not have finite variance, but only has $p$-th moment with $p \in (1,2)$. Instead of using estimation procedure based on truncated…
The generalization ability of minimizers of the empirical risk in the context of binary classification has been investigated under a wide variety of complexity assumptions for the collection of classifiers over which optimization is…
The Statistical Learning Theory (SLT) provides the theoretical guarantees for supervised machine learning based on the Empirical Risk Minimization Principle (ERMP). Such principle defines an upper bound to ensure the uniform convergence of…
A new variant of Newton's method for empirical risk minimization is studied, where at each iteration of the optimization algorithm, the gradient and Hessian of the objective function are replaced by robust estimators taken from existing…
In statistical learning theory, generalization error is used to quantify the degree to which a supervised machine learning algorithm may overfit to training data. Recent work [Xu and Raginsky (2017)] has established a bound on the…
In stochastic convex optimization the goal is to minimize a convex function $F(x) \doteq {\mathbf E}_{{\mathbf f}\sim D}[{\mathbf f}(x)]$ over a convex set $\cal K \subset {\mathbb R}^d$ where $D$ is some unknown distribution and each…
We consider a reinforcement learning setting in which the deployment environment is different from the training environment. Applying a robust Markov decision processes formulation, we extend the distributionally robust $Q$-learning…
Motivated by the study of $Q$-learning algorithms in reinforcement learning, we study a class of stochastic approximation procedures based on operators that satisfy monotonicity and quasi-contractivity conditions with respect to an…
The field of Machine Learning has changed significantly since the 1970s. However, its most basic principle, Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM), remains unchanged. We propose Functional Risk Minimization~(FRM), a general framework where…
We present an algorithm for the statistical learning setting with a bounded exp-concave loss in $d$ dimensions that obtains excess risk $O(d \log(1/\delta)/n)$ with probability at least $1 - \delta$. The core technique is to boost the…