Related papers: A Minimax Approach to Supervised Learning
Probabilistic reasoning systems combine different probabilistic rules and probabilistic facts to arrive at the desired probability values of consequences. In this paper we describe the MESA-algorithm (Maximum Entropy by Simulated Annealing)…
This paper concerns the study of optimal (supremum and infimum) uncertainty bounds for systems where the input (or prior) probability measure is only partially/imperfectly known (e.g., with only statistical moments and/or on a coarse…
We develop a continuous-time entropy-regularized reinforcement learning framework under model uncertainty. By applying Sion's minimax theorem, we transform the intractable robust control problem into an equivalent standard…
In today's heavily overparameterized models, the value of the training loss provides few guarantees on model generalization ability. Indeed, optimizing only the training loss value, as is commonly done, can easily lead to suboptimal model…
We consider the problem of federated learning in a one-shot setting in which there are $m$ machines, each observing $n$ sample functions from an unknown distribution on non-convex loss functions. Let $F:[-1,1]^d\to\mathbb{R}$ be the…
Maximum entropy principle (MEP) offers an effective and unbiased approach to inferring unknown probability distributions when faced with incomplete information, while neural networks provide the flexibility to learn complex distributions…
There is a growing demand for efficient data removal to comply with regulations like the GDPR and to mitigate the influence of biased or corrupted data. This has motivated the field of machine unlearning, which aims to eliminate the…
We consider the problem of learning a loss function which, when minimized over a training dataset, yields a model that approximately minimizes a validation error metric. Though learning an optimal loss function is NP-hard, we present an…
The most basic assumption used in statistical learning theory is that training data and test data are drawn from the same underlying distribution. Unfortunately, in many applications, the "in-domain" test data is drawn from a distribution…
Loss minimization is a dominant paradigm in machine learning, where a predictor is trained to minimize some loss function that depends on an uncertain event (e.g., "will it rain tomorrow?''). Different loss functions imply different…
Minimizing cross-entropy over the softmax scores of a linear map composed with a high-capacity encoder is arguably the most popular choice for training neural networks on supervised learning tasks. However, recent works show that one can…
Since its inception, the modus operandi of multi-task learning (MTL) has been to minimize the task-wise mean of the empirical risks. We introduce a generalized loss-compositional paradigm for MTL that includes a spectrum of formulations as…
Supervised learning requires the specification of a loss function to minimise. While the theory of admissible losses from both a computational and statistical perspective is well-developed, these offer a panoply of different choices. In…
We consider the weakly supervised binary classification problem where the labels are randomly flipped with probability $1- {\alpha}$. Although there exist numerous algorithms for this problem, it remains theoretically unexplored how the…
Finding methods for making generalizable predictions is a fundamental problem of machine learning. By looking into similarities between the prediction problem for unknown data and the lossless compression we have found an approach that…
Learning conditional distributions $\pi^*(\cdot|x)$ is a central problem in machine learning, which is typically approached via supervised methods with paired data $(x,y) \sim \pi^*$. However, acquiring paired data samples is often…
This paper shows that dropout training in Generalized Linear Models is the minimax solution of a two-player, zero-sum game where an adversarial nature corrupts a statistician's covariates using a multiplicative nonparametric…
Supervised training of deep neural nets typically relies on minimizing cross-entropy. However, in many domains, we are interested in performing well on metrics specific to the application. In this paper we propose a direct loss minimization…
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…
While modern large-scale datasets often consist of heterogeneous subpopulations -- for example, multiple demographic groups or multiple text corpora -- the standard practice of minimizing average loss fails to guarantee uniformly low losses…