English
Related papers

Related papers: Fundamental Novel Consistency Theory: $H$-Consiste…

200 papers

Minimizing an adversarial surrogate risk is a common technique for learning robust classifiers. Prior work showed that convex surrogate losses are not statistically consistent in the adversarial context -- or in other words, a minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Natalie S. Frank

Hypothesis transfer learning (HTL) contrasts domain adaptation by allowing for a previous task leverage, named the source, into a new one, the target, without requiring access to the source data. Indeed, HTL relies only on a hypothesis…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-17 Anass Aghbalou , Guillaume Staerman

The foundational concept of Max-Margin in machine learning is ill-posed for output spaces with more than two labels such as in structured prediction. In this paper, we show that the Max-Margin loss can only be consistent to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Alex Nowak-Vila , Alessandro Rudi , Francis Bach

We carefully study how well minimizing convex surrogate loss functions, corresponds to minimizing the misclassification error rate for the problem of binary classification with linear predictors. In particular, we show that amongst all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Shai Ben-David , David Loker , Nathan Srebro , Karthik Sridharan

We formalize and study the natural approach of designing convex surrogate loss functions via embeddings, for problems such as classification, ranking, or structured prediction. In this approach, one embeds each of the finitely many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-12 Jessie Finocchiaro , Rafael Frongillo , Bo Waggoner

We propose a robust adversarial prediction framework for general multiclass classification. Our method seeks predictive distributions that robustly optimize non-convex and non-continuous multiclass loss metrics against the worst-case…

A central concern in classification is the vulnerability of machine learning models to adversarial attacks. Adversarial training is one of the most popular techniques for training robust classifiers, which involves minimizing an adversarial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Natalie S. Frank

We formalize and study the natural approach of designing convex surrogate loss functions via embeddings, for problems such as classification, ranking, or structured prediction. In this approach, one embeds each of the finitely many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-30 Jessie Finocchiaro , Rafael M. Frongillo , Bo Waggoner

The choice of loss function in classification involves a fundamental trade-off: smooth losses (like Cross-Entropy) enable fast optimization rates but yield slow square-root consistency bounds, while piecewise-linear losses (like Hinge)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Mehryar Mohri , Yutao Zhong

In statistical learning theory, convex surrogates of the 0-1 loss are highly preferred because of the computational and theoretical virtues that convexity brings in. This is of more importance if we consider smooth surrogates as witnessed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-11 Mehrdad Mahdavi , Lijun Zhang , Rong Jin

The top-$k$ error is often employed to evaluate performance for challenging classification tasks in computer vision as it is designed to compensate for ambiguity in ground truth labels. This practical success motivates our theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Forest Yang , Sanmi Koyejo

We study the rates of convergence from empirical surrogate risk minimizers to the Bayes optimal classifier. Specifically, we introduce the notion of \emph{consistency intensity} to characterize a surrogate loss function and exploit this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-26 Jingwei Zhang , Tongliang Liu , Dacheng Tao

In this work we provide a theoretical framework for structured prediction that generalizes the existing theory of surrogate methods for binary and multiclass classification based on estimating conditional probabilities with smooth convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-14 Alex Nowak-Vila , Francis Bach , Alessandro Rudi

Adversarially robust classification seeks a classifier that is insensitive to adversarial perturbations of test patterns. This problem is often formulated via a minimax objective, where the target loss is the worst-case value of the 0-1…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-14 Han Bao , Clayton Scott , Masashi Sugiyama

Cross-entropy is a widely used loss function in applications. It coincides with the logistic loss applied to the outputs of a neural network, when the softmax is used. But, what guarantees can we rely on when using cross-entropy as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Anqi Mao , Mehryar Mohri , Yutao Zhong

This paper aims to understand whether machine learning models should be trained using cost-sensitive surrogates or cost-agnostic ones (e.g., cross-entropy). Analyzing this question through the lens of $\mathcal{H}$-calibration, we find that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Sanket Shah , Milind Tambe , Jessie Finocchiaro

Generalization bounds for deep learning models are typically vacuous, not computable or restricted to specific model classes. In this paper, we tackle these issues by providing new disagreement-based certificates for the gap between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Mathieu Bazinet , Valentina Zantedeschi , Pascal Germain

The logistic loss function is often advocated in machine learning and statistics as a smooth and strictly convex surrogate for the 0-1 loss. In this paper we investigate the question of whether these smoothness and convexity properties make…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-05-16 Elad Hazan , Tomer Koren , Kfir Y. Levy

PAC-Bayesian bounds have proven to be a valuable tool for deriving generalization bounds and for designing new learning algorithms in machine learning. However, it typically focus on providing generalization bounds with respect to a chosen…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-19 The Tien Mai

Deep neural networks often fail when deployed in real-world contexts due to distribution shift, a critical barrier to building safe and reliable systems. An emerging approach to address this problem relies on \emph{disagreement discrepancy}…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Neil G. Marchant , Andrew C. Cullen , Feng Liu , Sarah M. Erfani