Related papers: Risk Bounds and Calibration for a Smart Predict-th…
In many real-world optimization problems, we have prior information about what objective function values are achievable. In this paper, we study the scenario that we have either exact knowledge of the minimum value or a, possibly inexact,…
We establish a formal connection between the decades-old surrogate outcome model in biostatistics and economics and the emerging field of prediction-powered inference (PPI). The connection treats predictions from pre-trained models,…
We consider minimizing functions for which it is expensive to compute the (possibly stochastic) gradient. Such functions are prevalent in reinforcement learning, imitation learning and adversarial training. Our target optimization framework…
Data-driven approaches to predict-then-optimize decision-making problems seek to mitigate the risk of uncertainty region misspecification in safety-critical settings. Current approaches, however, suffer from considering overly conservative…
Optimization models used to make discrete decisions often contain uncertain parameters that are context-dependent and estimated through prediction. To account for the quality of the decision made based on the prediction, decision-focused…
We present a detailed study of estimation errors in terms of surrogate loss estimation errors. We refer to such guarantees as $\mathscr{H}$-consistency estimation error bounds, since they account for the hypothesis set $\mathscr{H}$…
We formalize and study the natural approach of designing convex surrogate loss functions via embeddings, for problems such as classification, ranking, or structured prediction. In this approach, one embeds each of the finitely many…
In this dissertation, we focus on several important problems in structured prediction. In structured prediction, the label has a rich intrinsic substructure, and the loss varies with respect to the predicted label and the true label pair.…
Surrogate risk minimization is an ubiquitous paradigm in supervised machine learning, wherein a target problem is solved by minimizing a surrogate loss on a dataset. Surrogate regret bounds, also called excess risk bounds, are a common tool…
We consider the predict-then-optimize paradigm for decision-making in which a practitioner (1) trains a supervised learning model on historical data of decisions, contexts, and rewards, and then (2) uses the resulting model to make future…
Although there exist plentiful theories of empirical risk minimization (ERM) for supervised learning, current theoretical understandings of ERM for a related problem---stochastic convex optimization (SCO), are limited. In this work, we…
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…
We formalize and study the natural approach of designing convex surrogate loss functions via embeddings, for problems such as classification, ranking, or structured prediction. In this approach, one embeds each of the finitely many…
While traditional distributionally robust optimization (DRO) aims to minimize the maximal risk over a set of distributions, Agarwal and Zhang (2022) recently proposed a variant that replaces risk with excess risk. Compared to DRO, the new…
Surrogate regret bounds, also known as excess risk bounds, bridge the gap between the convergence rates of surrogate and target losses. The regret transfer is lossless if the surrogate regret bound is linear. While convex smooth surrogate…
Stochastic convex optimization over an $\ell_1$-bounded domain is ubiquitous in machine learning applications such as LASSO but remains poorly understood when learning with differential privacy. We show that, up to logarithmic factors the…
A large class of stochastic programs involve optimizing an expectation taken with respect to an underlying distribution that is unknown in practice. One popular approach to addressing the distributional uncertainty, known as the…
We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization (SCO). In this problem the goal is to approximately minimize the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex and Lipschitz loss…
For stochastic process models, parameter inference is often severely bottlenecked by computationally expensive likelihood functions. Simulation-based inference (SBI) bypasses this restriction by constructing amortized surrogate likelihoods,…
Prediction models are typically optimized independently from decision optimization. A smart predict then optimize (SPO) framework optimizes prediction models to minimize downstream decision regret. In this paper we present dboost, the first…