Related papers: Extending Universal Intelligence Models with Forma…
This is an up-to-date introduction to and overview of the Minimum Description Length (MDL) Principle, a theory of inductive inference that can be applied to general problems in statistics, machine learning and pattern recognition. While MDL…
In the signal processing and statistics literature, the minimum description length (MDL) principle is a popular tool for choosing model complexity. Successful examples include signal denoising and variable selection in linear regression,…
We study the properties of the Minimum Description Length principle for sequence prediction, considering a two-part MDL estimator which is chosen from a countable class of models. This applies in particular to the important case of…
State-of-the-art neural networks can be trained to become remarkable solutions to many problems. But while these architectures can express symbolic, perfect solutions, trained models often arrive at approximations instead. We show that the…
Compression and generalization are fundamentally related through Solomonoff induction and the minimum description length principle (MDL), which predict that simpler models generalize better when data arises from low-complexity…
Solomonoff induction is held as a gold standard for learning, but it is known to be incomputable. We quantify its incomputability by placing various flavors of Solomonoff's prior M in the arithmetical hierarchy. We also derive computability…
We analyze differences between two information-theoretically motivated approaches to statistical inference and model selection: the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle, and the Minimum Message Length (MML) principle. Based on this…
The Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle is solidly based on a provably ideal method of inference using Kolmogorov complexity. We test how the theory behaves in practice on a general problem in model selection: that of learning the…
A major challenge in designing efficient statistical supervised learning algorithms is finding representations that perform well not only on available training samples but also on unseen data. While the study of representation learning has…
Although much of the success of Deep Learning builds on learning good representations, a rigorous method to evaluate their quality is lacking. In this paper, we treat the evaluation of representations as a model selection problem and…
Solomonoff's inductive learning model is a powerful, universal and highly elegant theory of sequence prediction. Its critical flaw is that it is incomputable and thus cannot be used in practice. It is sometimes suggested that it may still…
We propose that Solomonoff induction is complete in the physical sense via several strong physical arguments. We also argue that Solomonoff induction is fully applicable to quantum mechanics. We show how to choose an objective reference…
We propose a novel framework for multitask reinforcement learning based on the minimum description length (MDL) principle. In this approach, which we term MDL-control (MDL-C), the agent learns the common structure among the tasks with which…
An efficient representation of observed data has many benefits in various domains of engineering and science. Representing static data sets, such as images, is a living branch in machine learning and eases downstream tasks, such as…
General-purpose, intelligent, learning agents cycle through sequences of observations, actions, and rewards that are complex, uncertain, unknown, and non-Markovian. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small…
The Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle offers a formal framework for applying Occam's razor in machine learning. However, its application to neural networks such as Transformers is challenging due to the lack of a principled,…
The Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle selects the model that has the shortest code for data plus model. We show that for a countable class of models, MDL predictions are close to the true distribution in a strong sense. The result…
We study the properties of the MDL (or maximum penalized complexity) estimator for Regression and Classification, where the underlying model class is countable. We show in particular a finite bound on the Hellinger losses under the only…
Robust low-rank matrix estimation is a topic of increasing interest, with promising applications in a variety of fields, from computer vision to data mining and recommender systems. Recent theoretical results establish the ability of such…
Recently, AI systems have made remarkable progress in various tasks. Deep Reinforcement Learning(DRL) is an effective tool for agents to learn policies in low-level state spaces to solve highly complex tasks. Researchers have introduced…