Related papers: `local' vs. `global' parameters -- breaking the ga…
We study prediction and estimation problems using empirical risk minimization, relative to a general convex loss function. We obtain sharp error rates even when concentration is false or is very restricted, for example, in heavy-tailed…
In many applications, data come with a natural ordering. This ordering can often induce local dependence among nearby variables. However, in complex data, the width of this dependence may vary, making simple assumptions such as a constant…
Deep learning has been applied to various tasks in the field of machine learning and has shown superiority to other common procedures such as kernel methods. To provide a better theoretical understanding of the reasons for its success, we…
We study the fundamental problem of learning the parameters of a high-dimensional Gaussian in the presence of noise -- where an $\varepsilon$-fraction of our samples were chosen by an adversary. We give robust estimators that achieve…
Consider estimating a structured signal $\mathbf{x}_0$ from linear, underdetermined and noisy measurements $\mathbf{y}=\mathbf{A}\mathbf{x}_0+\mathbf{z}$, via solving a variant of the lasso algorithm: $\hat{\mathbf{x}}=\arg\min_\mathbf{x}\{…
We propose new bounds on the error of learning algorithms in terms of a data-dependent notion of complexity. The estimates we establish give optimal rates and are based on a local and empirical version of Rademacher averages, in the sense…
Generalization error (also known as the out-of-sample error) measures how well the hypothesis learned from training data generalizes to previously unseen data. Proving tight generalization error bounds is a central question in statistical…
We study the problem of learning general (i.e., not necessarily homogeneous) halfspaces with Random Classification Noise under the Gaussian distribution. We establish nearly-matching algorithmic and Statistical Query (SQ) lower bound…
Most modern learning problems are over-parameterized, where the number of learnable parameters is much greater than the number of training data points. In this over-parameterized regime, the training loss typically has infinitely many…
We study learning problems involving arbitrary classes of functions $F$, distributions $X$ and targets $Y$. Because proper learning procedures, i.e., procedures that are only allowed to select functions in $F$, tend to perform poorly unless…
This paper considers the linear inverse problem where we wish to estimate a structured signal $x$ from its corrupted observations. When the problem is ill-posed, it is natural to make use of a convex function $f(\cdot)$ that exploits the…
We observe that given two (compatible) classes of functions $\mathcal{F}$ and $\mathcal{H}$ with small capacity as measured by their uniform covering numbers, the capacity of the composition class $\mathcal{H} \circ \mathcal{F}$ can become…
This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…
A central goal of meta-learning is to find a learning rule that enables fast adaptation across a set of tasks, by learning the appropriate inductive bias for that set. Most meta-learning algorithms try to find a \textit{global} learning…
In this note we solve a general statistical inverse problem under absence of knowledge of both the noise level and the noise distribution via application of the (modified) heuristic discrepancy principle. Hereby the unbounded (non-Gaussian)…
This article studies the achievable guarantees on the error rates of certain learning algorithms, with particular focus on refining logarithmic factors. Many of the results are based on a general technique for obtaining bounds on the error…
It is shown that a class of optical physical unclonable functions (PUFs) can be learned to arbitrary precision with arbitrarily high probability, even in the presence of noise, given access to polynomially many challenge-response pairs and…
We study the learning performance of gradient descent when the empirical risk is weakly convex, namely, the smallest negative eigenvalue of the empirical risk's Hessian is bounded in magnitude. By showing that this eigenvalue can control…
Inhomogeneities in real-world data, e.g., due to changes in the observation noise level or variations in the structural complexity of the source function, pose a unique set of challenges for statistical inference. Accounting for them can…
We quantify the minimax rate for a nonparametric regression model over a star-shaped function class $\mathcal{F}$ with bounded diameter. We obtain a minimax rate of ${\varepsilon^{\ast}}^2\wedge\mathrm{diam}(\mathcal{F})^2$ where…