Related papers: Learning and Testing Junta Distributions with Subc…
We give a general unified method that can be used for $L_1$ {\em closeness testing} of a wide range of univariate structured distribution families. More specifically, we design a sample optimal and computationally efficient algorithm for…
Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…
We give the first super-polynomial (in fact, mildly exponential) lower bounds for tolerant testing (equivalently, distance estimation) of monotonicity, unateness, and juntas with a constant separation between the "yes" and "no" cases.…
We are interested in testing properties of distributions with systematically mislabeled samples. Our goal is to make decisions about unknown probability distributions, using a sample that has been collected by a confused collector, such as…
There are many high dimensional function classes that have fast agnostic learning algorithms when assumptions on the distribution of examples can be made, such as Gaussianity or uniformity over the domain. But how can one be confident that…
We prove that $\tilde{\Theta}(k d^2 / \varepsilon^2)$ samples are necessary and sufficient for learning a mixture of $k$ Gaussians in $\mathbb{R}^d$, up to error $\varepsilon$ in total variation distance. This improves both the known upper…
We introduce a framework for proving lower bounds on computational problems over distributions against algorithms that can be implemented using access to a statistical query oracle. For such algorithms, access to the input distribution is…
We introduce the problem of simultaneously learning all powers of a Poisson Binomial Distribution (PBD). A PBD of order $n$ is the distribution of a sum of $n$ mutually independent Bernoulli random variables $X_i$, where $\mathbb{E}[X_i] =…
Organisms and algorithms learn probability distributions from previous observations, either over evolutionary time or on the fly. In the absence of regularities, estimating the underlying distribution from data would require observing each…
Several learning problems involve solving min-max problems, e.g., empirical distributional robust learning or learning with non-standard aggregated losses. More specifically, these problems are convex-linear problems where the minimization…
In this work we revisit two classic high-dimensional online learning problems, namely linear regression and contextual bandits, from the perspective of adversarial robustness. Existing works in algorithmic robust statistics make strong…
Given a black-box representing an unknown Boolean function $f$ of $n$ variables, in this paper we propose a fast quantum algorithm to test whether or not a certain variable in the function $f$ is a junta variable. The proposed algorithm…
Several well-studied models of access to data samples, including statistical queries, local differential privacy and low-communication algorithms rely on queries that provide information about a function of a single sample. (For example, a…
We consider the problem of approximating and learning disjunctions (or equivalently, conjunctions) on symmetric distributions over $\{0,1\}^n$. Symmetric distributions are distributions whose PDF is invariant under any permutation of the…
We consider the problem of designing contextual bandit algorithms in the ``cross-learning'' setting of Balseiro et al., where the learner observes the loss for the action they play in all possible contexts, not just the context of the…
We study how temporal correlations in the data can make certain sparse learning problems efficiently learnable by gradient-based methods. Our focus is on Boolean k-juntas, a canonical sparse learning problem known to pose barriers for…
A conditional sampling oracle for a probability distribution D returns samples from the conditional distribution of D restricted to a specified subset of the domain. A recent line of work (Chakraborty et al. 2013 and Cannone et al. 2014)…
Part I of this work [2] developed the exact diffusion algorithm to remove the bias that is characteristic of distributed solutions for deterministic optimization problems. The algorithm was shown to be applicable to a larger set of…
K-means clustering is a workhorse of unsupervised learning, but it is notoriously brittle to outliers, distribution shifts, and limited sample sizes. Viewing k-means as Lloyd--Max quantization of the empirical distribution, we develop a…
We consider Gibbs distributions, which are families of probability distributions over a discrete space $\Omega$ with probability mass function of the form $\mu^\Omega_\beta(\omega) \propto e^{\beta H(\omega)}$ for $\beta$ in an interval…