Related papers: Computational-Statistical Tradeoffs from NP-hardne…
We revisit the foundations of fairness and its interplay with utility and efficiency in settings where the training data contain richer labels, such as individual types, rankings, or risk estimates, rather than just binary outcomes. In this…
The development of cluster computing frameworks has allowed practitioners to scale out various statistical estimation and machine learning algorithms with minimal programming effort. This is especially true for machine learning problems…
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…
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…
When a Genetic Algorithm (GA), or a stochastic algorithm in general, is employed in a statistical problem, the obtained result is affected by both variability due to sampling, that refers to the fact that only a sample is observed, and…
With the growing adoption of machine learning (ML) systems in areas like law enforcement, criminal justice, finance, hiring, and admissions, it is increasingly critical to guarantee the fairness of decisions assisted by ML. In this paper,…
Consider a multi-class labelling problem, where the labels can take values in $[k]$, and a predictor predicts a distribution over the labels. In this work, we study the following foundational question: Are there notions of multi-class…
We continue the study of statistical/computational tradeoffs in learning robust classifiers, following the recent work of Bubeck, Lee, Price and Razenshteyn who showed examples of classification tasks where (a) an efficient robust…
The reliable fraction of information is an attractive score for quantifying (functional) dependencies in high-dimensional data. In this paper, we systematically explore the algorithmic implications of using this measure for optimization. We…
We study the design of computationally efficient algorithms with provable guarantees, that are robust to adversarial (test time) perturbations. While there has been an proliferation of recent work on this topic due to its connections to…
A fundamental problem in adversarial machine learning is to quantify how much training data is needed in the presence of evasion attacks. In this paper we address this issue within the framework of PAC learning, focusing on the class of…
We derive a fundamental trade-off between standard and adversarial risk in a rather general situation that formalizes the following simple intuition: "If no (nearly) optimal predictor is smooth, adversarial robustness comes at the cost of…
Variational inference has recently emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in large-scale Bayesian inference. The core idea is to trade statistical accuracy for computational efficiency. In this…
The main purpose of this paper is to study the NP-complete subset-sum problem, not in the usual context of time-complexity-based classification of the algorithms (exponential/polynomial), but through a new kind of algorithmic classification…
Current techniques in machine learning are so far are unable to learn classifiers that are robust to adversarial perturbations. However, they are able to learn non-robust classifiers with very high accuracy, even in the presence of random…
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…
We prove that it is NP-hard to properly PAC learn decision trees with queries, resolving a longstanding open problem in learning theory (Bshouty 1993; Guijarro-Lavin-Raghavan 1999; Mehta-Raghavan 2002; Feldman 2016). While there has been a…
In computing, as in many aspects of life, changes incur cost. Many optimization problems are formulated as a one-time instance starting from scratch. However, a common case that arises is when we already have a set of prior assignments, and…
This article presents a general solution to the problem of computational complexity. First, it gives a historical introduction to the problem since the revival of the foundational problems of mathematics at the end of the 19th century.…
Over recent years, devising classification algorithms that are robust to adversarial perturbations has emerged as a challenging problem. In particular, deep neural nets (DNNs) seem to be susceptible to small imperceptible changes over test…