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Related papers: On Agnostic PAC Learning in the Small Error Regime

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We study the problem of agnostic PAC reinforcement learning (RL): given a policy class $\Pi$, how many rounds of interaction with an unknown MDP (with a potentially large state and action space) are required to learn an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Zeyu Jia , Gene Li , Alexander Rakhlin , Ayush Sekhari , Nathan Srebro

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Liad Erez , Alon Cohen , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour , Shay Moran

In probably approximately correct (PAC) reinforcement learning (RL), an agent is required to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal policy with probability $1-\delta$. While minimax optimal algorithms exist for this problem, its instance-dependent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Andrea Tirinzoni , Aymen Al-Marjani , Emilie Kaufmann

A fundamental problem in robust learning is asymmetry: a learner needs to correctly classify every one of exponentially-many perturbations that an adversary might make to a test-time natural example. In contrast, the attacker only needs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Saba Ahmadi , Avrim Blum , Omar Montasser , Kevin Stangl

Agnostic online learning is classically solved via a reduction to the realizable setting, utilizing Littlestone's Standard Optimal Algorithm (SOA) as a base learner. However, the SOA is computationally intractable to execute even for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Idan Attias , Steve Hanneke , Arvind Ramaswami

Interpretable Machine Learning faces a recurring challenge of explaining the predictions made by opaque classifiers such as ensemble models, kernel methods, or neural networks in terms that are understandable to humans. When the model is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Frederic Koriche , Jean-Marie Lagniez , Stefan Mengel , Chi Tran

We show hardness of improperly learning halfspaces in the agnostic model, both in the distribution-independent as well as the distribution-specific setting, based on the assumption that worst-case lattice problems, such as GapSVP or SIVP,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Stefan Tiegel

In a wide range of statistical learning problems such as ranking, clustering or metric learning among others, the risk is accurately estimated by $U$-statistics of degree $d\geq 1$, i.e. functionals of the training data with low variance…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-25 Stéphan Clémençon , Aurélien Bellet , Igor Colin

We study the problem of {\em properly} learning large margin halfspaces in the agnostic PAC model. In more detail, we study the complexity of properly learning $d$-dimensional halfspaces on the unit ball within misclassification error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-30 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Pasin Manurangsi

Following the wide-spread adoption of machine learning models in real-world applications, the phenomenon of performativity, i.e. model-dependent shifts in the test distribution, becomes increasingly prevalent. Unfortunately, since models…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-21 Ivan Kirev , Lyuben Baltadzhiev , Nikola Konstantinov

We investigate the learning dynamics of classifiers in scenarios where classes are separable or classifiers are over-parameterized. In both cases, Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) results in zero training error. However, there are many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Julius Martinetz , Christoph Linse , Thomas Martinetz

We study the sample complexity of the best-case Empirical Risk Minimizer in the setting of stochastic convex optimization. We show that there exists an instance in which the sample size is linear in the dimension, learning is possible, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Tal Burla , Roi Livni

The apparent difficulty of efficient distribution-free PAC learning has led to a large body of work on distribution-specific learning. Distributional assumptions facilitate the design of efficient algorithms but also limit their reach and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Guy Blanc , Jane Lange , Carmen Strassle , Li-Yang Tan

We study upper and lower bounds on the sample-complexity of learning near-optimal behaviour in finite-state discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). For the upper bound we make the assumption that each action leads to at most two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-05-17 Tor Lattimore , Marcus Hutter

The basic problem in the PAC model of computational learning theory is to determine which hypothesis classes are efficiently learnable. There is presently a dearth of results showing hardness of learning problems. Moreover, the existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-03-11 Amit Daniely , Nati Linial , Shai Shalev-Shwartz

We study the minimal error of the Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) procedure in the task of regression, both in the random and the fixed design settings. Our sharp lower bounds shed light on the possibility (or impossibility) of adapting…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-02-25 Gil Kur , Alexander Rakhlin

Standard Bayesian learning is known to have suboptimal generalization capabilities under misspecification and in the presence of outliers. PAC-Bayes theory demonstrates that the free energy criterion minimized by Bayesian learning is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Matteo Zecchin , Sangwoo Park , Osvaldo Simeone , Marios Kountouris , David Gesbert

We study the problem of agnostically learning halfspaces which is defined by a fixed but unknown distribution $\mathcal{D}$ on $\mathbb{Q}^n\times \{\pm 1\}$. We define $\mathrm{Err}_{\mathrm{HALF}}(\mathcal{D})$ as the least error of a…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2016-03-15 Amit Daniely

We consider the problem of learning the best-fitting single neuron as measured by the expected square loss $\mathbb{E}_{(x,y)\sim \mathcal{D}}[(\sigma(w^\top x)-y)^2]$ over some unknown joint distribution $\mathcal{D}$ by using gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-01 Spencer Frei , Yuan Cao , Quanquan Gu

The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson