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We give a polynomial-time algorithm for learning high-dimensional halfspaces with margins in $d$-dimensional space to within desired TV distance when the ambient distribution is an unknown affine transformation of the $d$-fold product of an…
A long series of recent results and breakthroughs have led to faster and better distributed approximation algorithms for single source shortest paths (SSSP) and related problems in the CONGEST model. The runtime of all these algorithms,…
In the unsplittable flow problem on a path, we are given a capacitated path $P$ and $n$ tasks, each task having a demand, a profit, and start and end vertices. The goal is to compute a maximum profit set of tasks, such that for each edge…
Design of experiments, random search, initialization of population-based methods, or sampling inside an epoch of an evolutionary algorithm use a sample drawn according to some probability distribution for approximating the location of an…
When data is of an extraordinarily large size or physically stored in different locations, the distributed nearest neighbor (NN) classifier is an attractive tool for classification. We propose a novel distributed adaptive NN classifier for…
In this paper, we study the problem of approximating the minimum cut in a distributed message-passing model, the CONGEST model. The minimum cut problem has been well-studied in the context of centralized algorithms. However, there were no…
We develop a maximum relative entropy formalism to generate optimal approximations to probability distributions. The central results consist in (a) justifying the use of relative entropy as the uniquely natural criterion to select a…
This paper presents a class of new algorithms for distributed statistical estimation that exploit divide-and-conquer approach. We show that one of the key benefits of the divide-and-conquer strategy is robustness, an important…
Given samples from an unknown distribution $p$, is it possible to distinguish whether $p$ belongs to some class of distributions $\mathcal{C}$ versus $p$ being far from every distribution in $\mathcal{C}$? This fundamental question has…
We consider the following basic learning task: given independent draws from an unknown distribution over a discrete support, output an approximation of the distribution that is as accurate as possible in $\ell_1$ distance (i.e. total…
Many randomized approximation algorithms operate by giving a procedure for simulating a random variable $X$ which has mean $\mu$ equal to the target answer, and a relative standard deviation bounded above by a known constant $c$. Examples…
We consider the problem of allocating samples to a finite set of discrete distributions in order to learn them uniformly well in terms of four common distance measures: $\ell_2^2$, $\ell_1$, $f$-divergence, and separation distance. To…
We devise a distributional variant of gradient temporal-difference (TD) learning. Distributional reinforcement learning has been demonstrated to outperform the regular one in the recent study \citep{bellemare2017distributional}. In the…
We study the question of closeness testing for two discrete distributions. More precisely, given samples from two distributions $p$ and $q$ over an $n$-element set, we wish to distinguish whether $p=q$ versus $p$ is at least $\eps$-far from…
We study the properties of the set of marginal distributions of infinite translation-invariant systems in the 2D square lattice. In cases where the local variables can only take a small number $d$ of possible values, we completely solve the…
Given a $d$-dimensional continuous (resp. discrete) probability distribution $\mu$ and a discrete distribution $\nu$, the semi-discrete (resp. discrete) Optimal Transport (OT) problem asks for computing a minimum-cost plan to transport mass…
We give two results on PAC learning DNF formulas using membership queries in the challenging "distribution-free" learning framework, where learning algorithms must succeed for an arbitrary and unknown distribution over $\{0,1\}^n$. (1) We…
We study the problem of estimating the covariance matrix of a high-dimensional distribution when a small constant fraction of the samples can be arbitrarily corrupted. Recent work gave the first polynomial time algorithms for this problem…
We show how any PAC learning algorithm that works under the uniform distribution can be transformed, in a blackbox fashion, into one that works under an arbitrary and unknown distribution $\mathcal{D}$. The efficiency of our transformation…
We consider the problem of uniform sampling of points on an algebraic variety. Specifically, we develop a randomized algorithm that, given a small set of multivariate polynomials over a sufficiently large finite field, produces a common…