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Inspired by recent work on learning with distribution shift, we give a general outlier removal algorithm called iterative polynomial filtering and show a number of striking applications for supervised learning with contamination: (1) We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Adam R. Klivans , Konstantinos Stavropoulos , Kevin Tian , Arsen Vasilyan

In this short note, we provide a sample complexity lower bound for learning linear predictors with respect to the squared loss. Our focus is on an agnostic setting, where no assumptions are made on the data distribution. This contrasts with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ohad Shamir

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of softmax attention remains a central bottleneck that limits their scalability. Alman and Song (NeurIPS…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Vladimir Braverman , Junze Yin , Haochen Zhang

We study the problem of learning general (i.e., not necessarily homogeneous) halfspaces under the Gaussian distribution on $R^d$ in the presence of some form of query access. In the classical pool-based active learning model, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Mingchen Ma

We study the problem of list-decodable linear regression, where an adversary can corrupt a majority of the examples. Specifically, we are given a set $T$ of labeled examples $(x, y) \in \mathbb{R}^d \times \mathbb{R}$ and a parameter $0<…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Ankit Pensia , Thanasis Pittas , Alistair Stewart

We introduce the lookahead-bounded Q-learning (LBQL) algorithm, a new, provably convergent variant of Q-learning that seeks to improve the performance of standard Q-learning in stochastic environments through the use of ``lookahead'' upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Ibrahim El Shar , Daniel R. Jiang

We study distribution-free nonparametric regression following a notion of average smoothness initiated by Ashlagi et al. (2021), which measures the "effective" smoothness of a function with respect to an arbitrary unknown underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Steve Hanneke , Aryeh Kontorovich , Guy Kornowski

Due to the drastic gap in complexity between sequential and batch statistical learning, recent work has studied a smoothed sequential learning setting, where Nature is constrained to select contexts with density bounded by 1/{\sigma} with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-27 Adam Block , Max Simchowitz

Learning intersections of halfspaces is a central problem in Computational Learning Theory. Even for just two halfspaces, it remains a major open question whether learning is possible in polynomial time with respect to the margin $\gamma$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Ilias Diakonikolas , Mingchen Ma , Lisheng Ren , Christos Tzamos

We propose a stochastic approximation (SA) based method with randomization of samples for policy evaluation using the least squares temporal difference (LSTD) algorithm. Our proposed scheme is equivalent to running regular temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-27 L. A. Prashanth , Nathaniel Korda , Rémi Munos

We develop a framework using Hilbert spaces as a proxy to analyze PAC learning problems with structural properties. We consider a joint Hilbert space incorporating the relation between the true label and the predictor under a joint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Mohsen Heidari , Wojciech Szpankowski

Understanding the limitations of gradient methods, and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in particular, is a central challenge in learning theory. To that end, a commonly used tool is the Statistical Queries (SQ) framework, which studies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Daniel Barzilai , Ohad Shamir

We study the problems of quantum tomography and shadow tomography using measurements performed on individual, identical copies of an unknown $d$-dimensional state. We first revisit a known lower bound due to Haah et al. (2017) on quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-06-12 Angus Lowe , Ashwin Nayak

We consider stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for least-squares regression with potentially several passes over the data. While several passes have been widely reported to perform practically better in terms of predictive performance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-26 Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Alessandro Rudi , Francis Bach

Adaptive gradient methods, such as AdaGrad, are among the most successful optimization algorithms for neural network training. While these methods are known to achieve better dimensional dependence than stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-09 Ruichen Jiang , Devyani Maladkar , Aryan Mokhtari

Semi-supervised learning is attracting blooming attention, due to its success in combining unlabeled data. To mitigate potentially incorrect pseudo labels, recent frameworks mostly set a fixed confidence threshold to discard uncertain…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Lihe Yang , Zhen Zhao , Lei Qi , Yu Qiao , Yinghuan Shi , Hengshuang Zhao

Optimizing noisy functions online, when evaluating the objective requires experiments on a deployed system, is a crucial task arising in manufacturing, robotics and many others. Often, constraints on safe inputs are unknown ahead of time,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-06 Ilnura Usmanova , Yarden As , Maryam Kamgarpour , Andreas Krause

We study the complexity of learning $k$-mixtures of Gaussians ($k$-GMMs) on $\mathbb{R}^d$. This task is known to have complexity $d^{\Omega(k)}$ in full generality. To circumvent this exponential lower bound on the number of components,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Sushrut Karmalkar , Jasper C. H. Lee , Thanasis Pittas

Recent results in non-convex stochastic optimization demonstrate the convergence of popular adaptive algorithms (e.g., AdaGrad) under the $(L_0, L_1)$-smoothness condition, but the rate of convergence is a higher-order polynomial in terms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Michael Crawshaw , Mingrui Liu

We consider active learning for binary classification in the agnostic pool-based setting. The vast majority of works in active learning in the agnostic setting are inspired by the CAL algorithm where each query is uniformly sampled from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-17 Julian Katz-Samuels , Jifan Zhang , Lalit Jain , Kevin Jamieson