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In machine learning, the loss functions optimized during training often differ from the target loss that defines task performance due to computational intractability or lack of differentiability. We present an in-depth study of the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Yutao Zhong

In statistical learning theory, convex surrogates of the 0-1 loss are highly preferred because of the computational and theoretical virtues that convexity brings in. This is of more importance if we consider smooth surrogates as witnessed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-11 Mehrdad Mahdavi , Lijun Zhang , Rong Jin

The choice of loss function in classification involves a fundamental trade-off: smooth losses (like Cross-Entropy) enable fast optimization rates but yield slow square-root consistency bounds, while piecewise-linear losses (like Hinge)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Mehryar Mohri , Yutao Zhong

Surrogate risk minimization is an ubiquitous paradigm in supervised machine learning, wherein a target problem is solved by minimizing a surrogate loss on a dataset. Surrogate regret bounds, also called excess risk bounds, are a common tool…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Rafael Frongillo , Bo Waggoner

Loss functions drive the optimization of machine learning algorithms. The choice of a loss function can have a significant impact on the training of a model, and how the model learns the data. Binary classification is one of the major…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Rayan Wali

We study consistency properties of machine learning methods based on minimizing convex surrogates. We extend the recent framework of Osokin et al. (2017) for the quantitative analysis of consistency properties to the case of inconsistent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-10 Kirill Struminsky , Simon Lacoste-Julien , Anton Osokin

In this paper we refine the process of computing calibration functions for a number of multiclass classification surrogate losses. Calibration functions are a powerful tool for easily converting bounds for the surrogate risk (which can be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-22 Bernardo Ávila Pires , Csaba Szepesvári

We study the consistency of surrogate risks for robust binary classification. It is common to learn robust classifiers by adversarial training, which seeks to minimize the expected $0$-$1$ loss when each example can be maliciously corrupted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Natalie Frank , Jonathan Niles-Weed

We consider optimization of generalized performance metrics for binary classification by means of surrogate losses. We focus on a class of metrics, which are linear-fractional functions of the false positive and false negative rates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-10 Wojciech Kotłowski , Krzysztof Dembczyński

It is widely conjectured that the reason that training algorithms for neural networks are successful because all local minima lead to similar performance, for example, see (LeCun et al., 2015, Choromanska et al., 2015, Dauphin et al.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-06 Shiyu Liang , Ruoyu Sun , Yixuan Li , R. Srikant

Minimizing an adversarial surrogate risk is a common technique for learning robust classifiers. Prior work showed that convex surrogate losses are not statistically consistent in the adversarial context -- or in other words, a minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Natalie S. Frank

A central concern in classification is the vulnerability of machine learning models to adversarial attacks. Adversarial training is one of the most popular techniques for training robust classifiers, which involves minimizing an adversarial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Natalie S. Frank

A fundamental challenge in machine learning is the choice of a loss as it characterizes our learning task, is minimized in the training phase, and serves as an evaluation criterion for estimators. Proper losses are commonly chosen, ensuring…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-04 Han Bao , Asuka Takatsu

In this paper, we study the problem of consistency in the context of adversarial examples. Specifically, we tackle the following question: can surrogate losses still be used as a proxy for minimizing the $0/1$ loss in the presence of an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-23 Laurent Meunier , Raphaël Ettedgui , Rafael Pinot , Yann Chevaleyre , Jamal Atif

We present a detailed study of estimation errors in terms of surrogate loss estimation errors. We refer to such guarantees as $\mathscr{H}$-consistency estimation error bounds, since they account for the hypothesis set $\mathscr{H}$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-18 Pranjal Awasthi , Anqi Mao , Mehryar Mohri , Yutao Zhong

We introduce a new surrogate loss function called orbit loss in the structured prediction framework, which has good theoretical and practical advantages. While the orbit loss is not convex, it has a simple analytical gradient and a simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-12-10 Danny Karmon , Joseph Keshet

Evaluation metrics in machine learning are often hardly taken as loss functions, as they could be non-differentiable and non-decomposable, e.g., average precision and F1 score. This paper aims to address this problem by revisiting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Tao Huang , Zekang Li , Hua Lu , Yong Shan , Shusheng Yang , Yang Feng , Fei Wang , Shan You , Chang Xu

We present a detailed study of surrogate losses and algorithms for multi-label learning, supported by $H$-consistency bounds. We first show that, for the simplest form of multi-label loss (the popular Hamming loss), the well-known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Anqi Mao , Mehryar Mohri , Yutao Zhong

We propose a robust adversarial prediction framework for general multiclass classification. Our method seeks predictive distributions that robustly optimize non-convex and non-continuous multiclass loss metrics against the worst-case…

We formalize and study the natural approach of designing convex surrogate loss functions via embeddings, for problems such as classification, ranking, or structured prediction. In this approach, one embeds each of the finitely many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-30 Jessie Finocchiaro , Rafael M. Frongillo , Bo Waggoner