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Machine learning models traditionally assume that training and test data are independently and identically distributed. However, in real-world applications, the test distribution often differs from training. This problem, known as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Kotaro Yoshida , Hiroki Naganuma

Practitioners often face the challenge of deploying prediction models in new environments with shifted distributions of covariates and responses. With observational data, such shifts are often driven by unobserved confounding, and can in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Kulunu Dharmakeerthi , YoonHaeng Hur , Tengyuan Liang

Transfer learning involves taking information and insight from one problem domain and applying it to a new problem domain. Although widely used in practice, theory for transfer learning remains less well-developed. To address this, we prove…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-24 Jake Williams , Abel Tadesse , Tyler Sam , Huey Sun , George D. Montanez

Machine Learning (ML) has been a foundational topic in artificial intelligence (AI), providing both theoretical groundwork and practical tools for its exciting advancements. From ResNet for visual recognition to Transformer for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Zhuo Huang

Distributional reinforcement learning algorithms have attempted to utilize estimated uncertainty for exploration, such as optimism in the face of uncertainty. However, using the estimated variance for optimistic exploration may cause biased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Taehyun Cho , Seungyub Han , Heesoo Lee , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

It is becoming increasingly common in regression to train neural networks that model the entire distribution even if only the mean is required for prediction. This additional modeling often comes with performance gain and the reasons behind…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Ehsan Imani , Kai Luedemann , Sam Scholnick-Hughes , Esraa Elelimy , Martha White

This paper proposes deception as a mechanism for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization: by learning data representations that make training data appear independent and identically distributed (iid) to an observer, we can identify stable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Anirudha Majumdar

Missing data imputation, where a model is trained on observed data to estimate unobserved values, is a fundamental problem in machine learning. In this paper, we rigorously formulate imputation model learning as a mean-squared error risk…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-14 Luke Shannon , Song Liu , Katarzyna Reluga

Performative distribution shift captures the setting where the choice of which ML model is deployed changes the data distribution. For example, a bank which uses the number of open credit lines to determine a customer's risk of default on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Zachary Izzo , Lexing Ying , James Zou

Safely deploying machine learning models to the real world is often a challenging process. Models trained with data obtained from a specific geographic location tend to fail when queried with data obtained elsewhere, agents trained in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Marco Federici , Ryota Tomioka , Patrick Forré

Despite impressive success in many tasks, deep learning models are shown to rely on spurious features, which will catastrophically fail when generalized to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) is proposed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Shiji Xin , Yifei Wang , Jingtong Su , Yisen Wang

To train machine learning models that are robust to distribution shifts in the data, distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has been proven very effective. However, the existing approaches to learning a distributionally robust model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-21 Farzin Haddadpour , Mohammad Mahdi Kamani , Mehrdad Mahdavi , Amin Karbasi

Exploration and adaptation to new tasks in a transfer learning setup is a central challenge in reinforcement learning. In this work, we build on the idea of modeling a distribution over policies in a Bayesian deep reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Disha Shrivastava , Eeshan Gunesh Dhekane , Riashat Islam

Consider learning a policy purely on the basis of demonstrated behavior -- that is, with no access to reinforcement signals, no knowledge of transition dynamics, and no further interaction with the environment. This *strictly batch…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-15 Daniel Jarrett , Ioana Bica , Mihaela van der Schaar

Modern deep learning techniques have illustrated their excellent capabilities in many areas, but relies on large training data. Optimization-based meta-learning train a model on a variety tasks, such that it can solve new learning tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Penghao Jiang , Ke Xin , Zifeng Wang , Chunxi Li

Distributionally robust policy learning aims to find a policy that performs well under the worst-case distributional shift, and yet most existing methods for robust policy learning consider the worst-case joint distribution of the covariate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jingyuan Wang , Zhimei Ren , Ruohan Zhan , Zhengyuan Zhou

Common explanations for shortcut learning assume that the shortcut improves prediction under the training distribution but not in the test distribution. Thus, models trained via the typical gradient-based optimization of cross-entropy,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-25 Aahlad Puli , Lily Zhang , Yoav Wald , Rajesh Ranganath

We consider the problem of online learning in the presence of distribution shifts that occur at an unknown rate and of unknown intensity. We derive a new Bayesian online inference approach to simultaneously infer these distribution shifts…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-28 Aodong Li , Alex Boyd , Padhraic Smyth , Stephan Mandt

As the use of machine learning in high impact domains becomes widespread, the importance of evaluating safety has increased. An important aspect of this is evaluating how robust a model is to changes in setting or population, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Adarsh Subbaswamy , Roy Adams , Suchi Saria

In this paper we argue for the fundamental importance of the value distribution: the distribution of the random return received by a reinforcement learning agent. This is in contrast to the common approach to reinforcement learning which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-24 Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney , Rémi Munos