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In order to circumvent statistical and computational hardness results in sequential decision-making, recent work has considered smoothed online learning, where the distribution of data at each time is assumed to have bounded likeliehood…
Federated learning (FL) faces critical challenges, particularly in heterogeneous environments where non-independent and identically distributed data across clients can lead to unfair and inefficient model performance. In this work, we…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a widely-used approach to learn models that are robust against distribution shift. Compared with the standard optimization setting, the objective function in DRO is more difficult to optimize,…
Standard training via empirical risk minimization (ERM) can produce models that achieve high accuracy on average but low accuracy on certain groups, especially in the presence of spurious correlations between the input and label. Prior…
In recent years, multicalibration has emerged as a desirable learning objective for ensuring that a predictor is calibrated across a rich collection of overlapping subpopulations. Existing approaches typically achieve multicalibration by…
Given a collection of feature maps indexed by a set $\mathcal{T}$, we study the performance of empirical risk minimization (ERM) on regression problems with square loss over the union of the linear classes induced by these feature maps.…
The Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) framework aims to learn invariant features from a set of environments for solving the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization problem. The underlying assumption is that the causal components of the…
Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is the workhorse of machine learning, whether for classification and regression or for off-policy policy learning, but its model-agnostic guarantees can fail when we use adaptively collected data, such as…
Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is ubiquitous in machine learning and underlies most supervised learning methods. While there has been a large body of work on algorithms for various ERM problems, the exact computational complexity of ERM…
Recent progress in Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning is increasingly driven by the refinement of post-training loss functions and alignment strategies. However, standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigms like Group Relative Policy…
Developing learning methods which do not discriminate subgroups in the population is a central goal of algorithmic fairness. One way to reach this goal is by modifying the data representation in order to meet certain fairness constraints.…
We consider the problem of offline reinforcement learning with model-based control, whose goal is to learn a dynamics model from the experience replay and obtain a pessimism-oriented agent under the learned model. Current model-based…
Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to respond correctly to prompts that align well with the data they were trained and fine-tuned on. Yet, small shifts in wording, format, or language can trigger surprisingly large failures, especially on…
Despite empirical risk minimization (ERM) is widely applied in the machine learning community, its performance is limited on data with spurious correlation or subpopulation that is introduced by hidden attributes. Existing literature…
We study the minimal error of the Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) procedure in the task of regression, both in the random and the fixed design settings. Our sharp lower bounds shed light on the possibility (or impossibility) of adapting…
Many existing group fairness-aware training methods aim to achieve the group fairness by either re-weighting underrepresented groups based on certain rules or using weakly approximated surrogates for the fairness metrics in the objective as…
Modern deep learning models often achieve high overall performance, but consistently fail on specific subgroups. Group distributionally robust optimization (group DRO) addresses this problem by minimizing the worst-group loss, but it fails…
Machine Learning (ML) models trained on data from multiple demographic groups can inherit representation disparity (Hashimoto et al., 2018) that may exist in the data: the model may be less favorable to groups contributing less to the…
Recently, invariant risk minimization (IRM) was proposed as a promising solution to address out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. However, it is unclear when IRM should be preferred over the widely-employed empirical risk minimization…
This paper studies Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO), a fundamental framework for enhancing the robustness and generalization of statistical learning and optimization. An effective ambiguity set for DRO must involve distributions…