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A fundamental question in the theory of reinforcement learning is: suppose the optimal $Q$-function lies in the linear span of a given $d$ dimensional feature mapping, is sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) possible? The recent and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Yuanhao Wang , Ruosong Wang , Sham M. Kakade

We study the differentially private (DP) empirical risk minimization (ERM) problem under the semi-sensitive DP setting where only some features are sensitive. This generalizes the Label DP setting where only the label is sensitive. We give…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-28 Badih Ghazi , Pritish Kamath , Ravi Kumar , Pasin Manurangsi , Raghu Meka , Chiyuan Zhang

Classical optimisation theory guarantees monotonic objective decrease for gradient descent (GD) when employed in a small step size, or ``stable", regime. In contrast, gradient descent on neural networks is frequently performed in a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Lachlan Ewen MacDonald , Hancheng Min , Leandro Palma , Salma Tarmoun , Ziqing Xu , René Vidal

We obtain sharp oracle inequalities for the empirical risk minimization procedure in the regression model under the assumption that the target Y and the model F are subgaussian. The bound we obtain is sharp in the minimax sense if F is…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-09-20 Guillaume Lecué , Shahar Mendelson

We propose a general theorem providing upper bounds for the risk of an empirical risk minimizer (ERM).We essentially focus on the binary classification framework. We extend Tsybakov's analysis of the risk of an ERM under margin type…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-08-14 Pascal Massart , Élodie Nédélec

We revisit the recently introduced Local Glivenko-Cantelli setting, which studies distribution-dependent uniform convergence rates of the Empirical Mean Estimator (EME). In this work, we investigate generalizations of this setting where…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-05-30 Doron Cohen , Aryeh Kontorovich , Roi Weiss

Learning models that are robust to distribution shifts is a key concern in the context of their real-life applicability. Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) is a popular framework that aims to learn robust models from multiple environments.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Moulik Choraria , Ibtihal Ferwana , Ankur Mani , Lav R. Varshney

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

This guide provides a reference for high-probability regret bounds in empirical risk minimization (ERM). The presentation is modular: we begin with intuition and general proof strategies, then state broadly applicable guarantees under…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-04 Lars van der Laan

Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is a cornerstone of modern machine learning (ML), supported by advances in optimization theory that ensure efficient solutions with provable algorithmic and statistical learning rates. Privacy, memory,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Cheng Fang , Rishabh Dixit , Waheed U. Bajwa , Mert Gurbuzbalaban

Recent studies show that transformer-based architectures emulate gradient descent during a forward pass, contributing to in-context learning capabilities - an ability where the model adapts to new tasks based on a sequence of prompt…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-05-13 Karthik Duraisamy

We study problem-dependent rates, i.e., generalization errors that scale near-optimally with the variance, the effective loss, or the gradient norms evaluated at the "best hypothesis." We introduce a principled framework dubbed "uniform…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-25 Yunbei Xu , Assaf Zeevi

Training a classifier under non-convex constraints has gotten increasing attention in the machine learning community thanks to its wide range of applications such as algorithmic fairness and class-imbalanced classification. However, several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-31 You-Lin Chen , Zhaoran Wang , Mladen Kolar

We present a novel, fast (exponential rate adaption), ab initio (hyper-parameter-free) gradient based optimizer algorithm. The main idea of the method is to adapt the learning rate $\alpha$ by situational awareness, mainly striving for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Alexander Kleinsorge , Stefan Kupper , Alexander Fauck , Felix Rothe

We prove that Riemannian contraction in a supervised learning setting implies generalization. Specifically, we show that if an optimizer is contracting in some Riemannian metric with rate $\lambda > 0$, it is uniformly algorithmically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-27 Leo Kozachkov , Patrick M. Wensing , Jean-Jacques Slotine

Many modern learning tasks involve fitting nonlinear models to data which are trained in an overparameterized regime where the parameters of the model exceed the size of the training dataset. Due to this overparameterization, the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Samet Oymak , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

Overparametrization often helps improve the generalization performance. This paper presents a dual view of overparametrization suggesting that downsampling may also help generalize. Focusing on the proportional regime $m\asymp n \asymp p$,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-10-17 Xin Chen , Yicheng Zeng , Siyue Yang , Qiang Sun

Empirical risk minimization is the main tool for prediction problems, but its extension to relational data remains unsolved. We solve this problem using recent ideas from graph sampling theory to (i) define an empirical risk for relational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-25 Victor Veitch , Morgane Austern , Wenda Zhou , David M. Blei , Peter Orbanz

A recent line of research has shown that gradient-based algorithms with random initialization can converge to the global minima of the training loss for over-parameterized (i.e., sufficiently wide) deep neural networks. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Difan Zou , Quanquan Gu

Recently there is a large amount of work devoted to the study of Markov chain stochastic gradient methods (MC-SGMs) which mainly focus on their convergence analysis for solving minimization problems. In this paper, we provide a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-19 Puyu Wang , Yunwen Lei , Yiming Ying , Ding-Xuan Zhou