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Replicability, introduced by (Impagliazzo et al. STOC '22), is the notion that algorithms should remain stable under a resampling of their inputs (given access to shared randomness). While a strong and interesting notion of stability, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Max Hopkins , Russell Impagliazzo , Christopher Ye

We study a recent model of collaborative PAC learning where $k$ players with $k$ different tasks collaborate to learn a single classifier that works for all tasks. Previous work showed that when there is a classifier that has very small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-01 Huy L. Nguyen , Lydia Zakynthinou

Collecting and leveraging data with good coverage properties plays a crucial role in different aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), including reward-free exploration and offline learning. However, the notion of "good coverage" really…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Aymen Al-Marjani , Andrea Tirinzoni , Emilie Kaufmann

Robust optimization (RO) is a common approach to tractably obtain safeguarding solutions for optimization problems with uncertain constraints. In this paper, we study a statistical framework to integrate data into RO, based on learning a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-03 L. Jeff Hong , Zhiyuan Huang , Henry Lam

We study offline reinforcement learning under $Q^\star$-approximation and partial coverage, a setting that motivates practical algorithms such as Conservative $Q$-Learning (CQL; Kumar et al., 2020) but has received limited theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Haolin Liu , Braham Snyder , Chen-Yu Wei

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is considered to be a promising approach to reduce the sample complexity that hinders model-free RL. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods has been rather limited. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yuping Luo , Huazhe Xu , Yuanzhi Li , Yuandong Tian , Trevor Darrell , Tengyu Ma

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

We study contrastive learning under the PAC learning framework. While a series of recent works have shown statistical results for learning under contrastive loss, based either on the VC-dimension or Rademacher complexity, their algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Jie Shen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-13 Pascale Gourdeau , Varun Kanade , Marta Kwiatkowska , James Worrell

Capturing latent variations ("contexts") is key to deploying reinforcement-learning (RL) agents beyond their training regime. We recast context-based RL as a dual inference-control problem and formally characterize two properties and their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Yuliang Gu , Hongpeng Cao , Marco Caccamo , Naira Hovakimyan

Continual learning aims to learn multiple tasks sequentially while preserving prior knowledge, but faces the challenge of catastrophic forgetting when adapting to new tasks. Recently, approaches leveraging pre-trained models have gained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Quan Cheng , Yuanyu Wan , Lingyu Wu , Chenping Hou , Lijun Zhang

Recently there is a surge of interest in understanding the horizon-dependence of the sample complexity in reinforcement learning (RL). Notably, for an RL environment with horizon length $H$, previous work have shown that there is a probably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Yuanzhi Li , Ruosong Wang , Lin F. Yang

This paper studies systematic exploration for reinforcement learning with rich observations and function approximation. We introduce a new model called contextual decision processes, that unifies and generalizes most prior settings. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-02 Nan Jiang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford , Robert E. Schapire

Given that machine learning algorithms are increasingly being deployed to aid in high stakes decision-making, uncertainty quantification methods that wrap around these black box models such as conformal prediction have received much…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-09 Kayla E. Scharfstein , Arun Kumar Kuchibhotla

Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Luckeciano C. Melo , Alessandro Abate , Yarin Gal

We are interested in how to design reinforcement learning agents that provably reduce the sample complexity for learning new tasks by transferring knowledge from previously-solved ones. The availability of solutions to related problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-03 Andrea Tirinzoni , Riccardo Poiani , Marcello Restelli

We introduce a novel technique for verification and model synthesis of sequential programs. Our technique is based on learning a regular model of the set of feasible paths in a program, and testing whether this model contains an incorrect…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2015-11-04 Yu-Fang Chen , Chiao Hsieh , Ondřej Lengál , Tsung-Ju Lii , Ming-Hsien Tsai , Bow-Yaw Wang , Farn Wang

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) remains fundamentally hard: without structure, any agent needs $\Omega(|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|/p)$ samples to recover rewards. We introduce Policy-Aware Matrix Completion (PAMC) as a first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Ibne Farabi Shihab , Sanjeda Akter , Anuj Sharma

We study model-based offline Reinforcement Learning with general function approximation without a full coverage assumption on the offline data distribution. We present an algorithm named Constrained Pessimistic Policy Optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-11 Masatoshi Uehara , Wen Sun

Precision and Recall are fundamental metrics in machine learning tasks where both accurate predictions and comprehensive coverage are essential, such as in multi-label learning, language generation, medical studies, and recommender systems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Lee Cohen , Yishay Mansour , Shay Moran , Han Shao