Related papers: Majority-of-Three: The Simplest Optimal Learner?
Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is a fundamental learning rule for statistical learning problems where the data is generated according to some unknown distribution $\mathsf{P}$ and returns a hypothesis $f$ chosen from a fixed class…
Machine learning approaches relying on such criteria as adversarial robustness or multi-agent settings have raised the need for solving game-theoretic equilibrium problems. Of particular relevance to these applications are methods targeting…
The expected improvement (EI) algorithm is a popular strategy for information collection in optimization under uncertainty. The algorithm is widely known to be too greedy, but nevertheless enjoys wide use due to its simplicity and ability…
We study multiclass PAC learning with bandit feedback, where inputs are classified into one of $K$ possible labels and feedback is limited to whether or not the predicted labels are correct. Our main contribution is in designing a novel…
Inspired by regularization techniques in statistics and machine learning, we study complementary composite minimization in the stochastic setting. This problem corresponds to the minimization of the sum of a (weakly) smooth function endowed…
Mixture models of Plackett-Luce (PL) -- one of the most fundamental ranking models -- are an active research area of both theoretical and practical significance. Most previously proposed parameter estimation algorithms instantiate the EM…
When fitting the learning data of an individual to algorithm-like learning models, the observations are so dependent and non-stationary that one may wonder what the classical Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) could do, even if it is the…
We study the problem of learning in the presence of an adversary that can corrupt an $\eta$ fraction of the training examples with the goal of causing failure on a specific test point. In the realizable setting, prior work established that…
We consider the minimum error entropy (MEE) criterion and an empirical risk minimization learning algorithm in a regression setting. A learning theory approach is presented for this MEE algorithm and explicit error bounds are provided in…
We consider the best arm identification problem, where the goal is to identify the arm with the highest mean reward from a set of $K$ arms under a limited sampling budget. This problem models many practical scenarios such as A/B testing. We…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…
We study human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (RL) with trajectory preferences, where instead of receiving a numeric reward at each step, the agent only receives preferences over trajectory pairs from a human overseer. The goal of the…
The EM algorithm is a novel numerical method to obtain maximum likelihood estimates and is often used for practical calculations. However, many of maximum likelihood estimation problems are nonconvex, and it is known that the EM algorithm…
Building on the framework introduced by Xu and Raginksy [1] for supervised learning problems, we study the best achievable performance for model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning problems. With this purpose, we define minimum Bayesian…
Stochastic approximation is a foundation for many algorithms found in machine learning and optimization. It is in general slow to converge: the mean square error vanishes as $O(n^{-1})$. A deterministic counterpart known as quasi-stochastic…
We prove a general result demonstrating the power of Lagrangian relaxation in solving constrained maximization problems with arbitrary objective functions. This yields a unified approach for solving a wide class of {\em subset selection}…
Revision of the paper previously entitled "Learning a Machine for the Decision in a Partially Observable Markov Universe" In this paper, we are interested in optimal decisions in a partially observable universe. Our approach is to directly…
A new likelihood based AR approximation is given for ARMA models. The usual algorithms for the computation of the likelihood of an ARMA model require $O(n)$ flops per function evaluation. Using our new approximation, an algorithm is…
Many high-stakes AI deployments proceed only if every stakeholder deems the system acceptable relative to their own minimum standard. With randomization over a finite menu of options, this becomes a feasibility question: does there exist a…
We consider a stochastic bandit problem with infinitely many arms. In this setting, the learner has no chance of trying all the arms even once and has to dedicate its limited number of samples only to a certain number of arms. All previous…