Related papers: Smoothed Analysis of Learning from Positive Sample…

Valiant's 1984 paper is widely credited with introducing the PAC learning model, but it, in fact, introduced a different model: unlike PAC learning, the learner receives only positives, may issue membership queries, and must output a…

We study online classification under smoothed adversaries. In this setting, at each time point, the adversary draws an example from a distribution that has a bounded density with respect to a fixed base measure, which is known apriori to…

We consider the problem of PAC-learning decision trees, i.e., learning a decision tree over the n-dimensional hypercube from independent random labeled examples. Despite significant effort, no polynomial-time algorithm is known for learning…

In traditional models of supervised learning, the goal of a learner -- given examples from an arbitrary joint distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d \times \{\pm 1\}$ -- is to output a hypothesis that is competitive (to within $\epsilon$) of the…

Agnostic learning of Boolean halfspaces is a fundamental problem in computational learning theory, but it is known to be computationally hard even for weak learning. Recent work [CKKMK24] proposed smoothed analysis as a way to bypass such…

Smoothed analysis is a powerful paradigm in overcoming worst-case intractability in unsupervised learning and high-dimensional data analysis. While polynomial time smoothed analysis guarantees have been obtained for worst-case intractable…

Active learning is a learning strategy whereby the machine learning algorithm actively identifies and labels data points to optimize its learning. This strategy is particularly effective in domains where an abundance of unlabeled data…

Statistical learning theory chiefly studies restricted hypothesis classes, particularly those with finite Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension. The fundamental quantity of interest is the sample complexity: the number of samples required to…

We study zeroth-order optimization where solutions must minimize a cost $d(s)$ while maintaining high probability under a complex generative prior $L(s)$ (e.g., a parameterized model). This reduces to sampling from a target distribution…

PAC-learning usually aims to compute a small subset ($\varepsilon$-sample/net) from $n$ items, that provably approximates a given loss function for every query (model, classifier, hypothesis) from a given set of queries, up to an additive…

Positive-confidence (Pconf) classification [Ishida et al., 2018] is a promising weakly-supervised learning method which trains a binary classifier only from positive data equipped with confidence. However, in practice, the confidence may be…

The binary classification problem has a situation where only biased data are observed in one of the classes. In this paper, we propose a new method to approach the positive and biased negative (PbN) classification problem, which is a weakly…

We informally call a stochastic process learnable if it admits a generalization error approaching zero in probability for any concept class with finite VC-dimension (IID processes are the simplest example). A mixture of learnable processes…

Learning under one-sided feedback (i.e., where we only observe the labels for examples we predicted positively on) is a fundamental problem in machine learning -- applications include lending and recommendation systems. Despite this, there…

Estimating the relative importance of each sample in a training set has important practical and theoretical value, such as in importance sampling or curriculum learning. This kind of focus on individual samples invokes the concept of…

We present a novel approach to learn binary classifiers when only positive and unlabeled instances are available (PU learning). This problem is routinely cast as a supervised task with label noise in the negative set. We use an ensemble of…

Randomized smoothing is currently a state-of-the-art method to construct a certifiably robust classifier from neural networks against $\ell_2$-adversarial perturbations. Under the paradigm, the robustness of a classifier is aligned with the…

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…

This paper addresses binary classification in scenarios where obtaining explicit instance level labels is impractical, by exploiting multiple weak labels defined on instance pairs. The existing SconfConfDiff classification framework relies…

The standard definition of PAC learning (Valiant 1984) requires learners to succeed under all distributions -- even ones that are intractable to sample from. This stands in contrast to samplable PAC learning (Blum, Furst, Kearns, and Lipton…