Related papers: A Survey of Learning Criteria Going Beyond the Usu…
A commonly used learning rule is to approximately minimize the \emph{average} loss over the training set. Other learning algorithms, such as AdaBoost and hard-SVM, aim at minimizing the \emph{maximal} loss over the training set. The average…
Stochastic dominance serves as a general framework for modeling a broad spectrum of decision preferences under uncertainty, with risk aversion as one notable example, as it naturally captures the intrinsic structure of the underlying…
Humans can often quickly and efficiently solve complex new learning tasks given only a small set of examples. In contrast, modern artificially intelligent systems often require thousands or millions of observations in order to solve even…
In this work we study loss functions for learning and evaluating probability distributions over large discrete domains. Unlike classification or regression where a wide variety of loss functions are used, in the distribution learning and…
This work initiates a general study of learning and generalization without the i.i.d. assumption, starting from first principles. While the traditional approach to statistical learning theory typically relies on standard assumptions from…
We study the problem of learning-to-learn: inferring a learning algorithm that works well on tasks sampled from an unknown distribution. As class of algorithms we consider Stochastic Gradient Descent on the true risk regularized by the…
Learning, whether natural or artificial, is a process of selection. It starts with a set of candidate options and selects the more successful ones. In the case of machine learning the selection is done based on empirical estimates of…
Distributed learning provides an attractive framework for scaling the learning task by sharing the computational load over multiple nodes in a network. Here, we investigate the performance of distributed learning for large-scale linear…
Machine learning has achieved tremendous success in a variety of domains in recent years. However, a lot of these success stories have been in places where the training and the testing distributions are extremely similar to each other. In…
We consider the problem of sequential decision making under uncertainty in which the loss caused by a decision depends on the following binary observation. In competitive on-line learning, the goal is to design decision algorithms that are…
Conventional rule learning algorithms aim at finding a set of simple rules, where each rule covers as many examples as possible. In this paper, we argue that the rules found in this way may not be the optimal explanations for each of the…
In learning-to-learn the goal is to infer a learning algorithm that works well on a class of tasks sampled from an unknown meta distribution. In contrast to previous work on batch learning-to-learn, we consider a scenario where tasks are…
Though the deep learning is pushing the machine learning to a new stage, basic theories of machine learning are still limited. The principle of learning, the role of the a prior knowledge, the role of neuron bias, and the basis for choosing…
The study of a machine learning problem is in many ways is difficult to separate from the study of the loss function being used. One avenue of inquiry has been to look at these loss functions in terms of their properties as scoring rules…
Standard meta-learning for representation learning aims to find a common representation to be shared across multiple tasks. The effectiveness of these methods is often limited when the nuances of the tasks' distribution cannot be captured…
Machine learning relies on the assumption that unseen test instances of a classification problem follow the same distribution as observed training data. However, this principle can break down when machine learning is used to make important…
State-of-the-art machine learning algorithms demonstrate close to absolute performance in selected challenges. We provide arguments that the reason can be in low variability of the samples and high effectiveness in learning typical…
Machine Learning algorithms are typically regarded as appropriate optimization schemes for minimizing risk functions that are constructed on the training set, which conveys statistical flavor to the corresponding learning problem. When the…
Algorithms often have tunable parameters that impact performance metrics such as runtime and solution quality. For many algorithms used in practice, no parameter settings admit meaningful worst-case bounds, so the parameters are made…
Existing approaches of prescriptive analytics -- where inputs of an optimization model can be predicted by leveraging covariates in a machine learning model -- often attempt to optimize the mean value of an uncertain objective. However,…