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Related papers: A Tunable Loss Function for Binary Classification

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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

Classification algorithms in machine learning often assume a flat label space. However, most real world data have dependencies between the labels, which can often be captured by using a hierarchy. Utilizing this relation can help develop a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Palash Goyal , Shalini Ghosh

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

The notion of margin loss has been central to the development and analysis of algorithms for binary classification. To date, however, there remains no consensus as to the analogue of the margin loss for multiclass classification. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-20 Yutong Wang , Clayton Scott

In this paper, we theoretically justify an approach popular among participants of the Higgs Boson Machine Learning Challenge to optimize approximate median significance (AMS). The approach is based on the following two-stage procedure.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-12-08 Wojciech Kotłowski

When minimizing the empirical risk in binary classification, it is a common practice to replace the zero-one loss with a surrogate loss to make the learning objective feasible to optimize. Examples of well-known surrogate losses for binary…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-07 Nontawat Charoenphakdee , Jongyeong Lee , Masashi Sugiyama

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

In many applications of classifier learning, training data suffers from label noise. Deep networks are learned using huge training data where the problem of noisy labels is particularly relevant. The current techniques proposed for learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-12-29 Aritra Ghosh , Himanshu Kumar , P. S. Sastry

The 01 loss is robust to outliers and tolerant to noisy data compared to convex loss functions. We conjecture that the 01 loss may also be more robust to adversarial attacks. To study this empirically we have developed a stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-11 Yunzhe Xue , Meiyan Xie , Usman Roshan

It has been observed that certain loss functions can render deep-learning pipelines robust against flaws in the data. In this paper, we support these empirical findings with statistical theory. We especially show that empirical-risk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Johannes Lederer

Algorithms in machine learning and AI do critically depend on at least three key components: (i) the risk function, which is the expectation of the loss function, (ii) the function space, which is often called the hypothesis space, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-08 Lena Helgerth , Andreas Christmann

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Xinyang Yi , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Constantine Caramanis , Han Liu

We consider supervised learning problems in which set predictions provide explicit uncertainty estimates. Using Choquet integrals (a.k.a. Lov{\'a}sz extensions), we propose a convex loss function for nondecreasing subset-valued functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Francis Bach

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

Convex potential minimisation is the de facto approach to binary classification. However, Long and Servedio [2010] proved that under symmetric label noise (SLN), minimisation of any convex potential over a linear function class can result…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-05-29 Brendan van Rooyen , Aditya Krishna Menon , Robert C. Williamson

In this paper, we provide analytic expressions for the first-order loss function, the complementary loss function and the second-order loss function for several probability distributions. These loss functions are important functions in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-11 Steven R. Pauly

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

We present surrogate regret bounds for arbitrary surrogate losses in the context of binary classification with label-dependent costs. Such bounds relate a classifier's risk, assessed with respect to a surrogate loss, to its cost-sensitive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2010-09-15 Clayton Scott

We present a new machine learning approach to estimate personalized treatment effects in the classical potential outcomes framework with binary outcomes. To overcome the problem that both treatment and control outcomes for the same unit are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-07 Siong Thye Goh , Cynthia Rudin

In binary classification and regression problems, it is well understood that Lipschitz continuity and smoothness of the loss function play key roles in governing generalization error bounds for empirical risk minimization algorithms. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-14 Ambuj Tewari , Sougata Chaudhuri