A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization (SCO). In this problem the goal is to approximately minimize the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex and Lipschitz loss functions. A long line of existing work on private convex optimization focuses on th…
Though machine learning algorithms excel at minimizing the average loss over a population, this might lead to large discrepancies between the losses across groups within the population. To capture this inequality, we introduce and study a notion we call maximum weighted loss discrepancy (MWLD), the maximum (weighted) d…
Training activation quantized neural networks involves minimizing a piecewise constant function whose gradient vanishes almost everywhere, which is undesirable for the standard back-propagation or chain rule. An empirical way around this issue is to use a straight-through estimator (STE) (Bengio et al., 2013) in the ba…
The classical asymptotic theory for parametric M-estimators guarantees that, in the limit of infinite sample size, the excess risk has a chi-square type distribution, even in the misspecified case. We demonstrate how self-concordance of the loss allows to characterize the critical sample size sufficient to guarantee …
We study the problem of finding the best linear model that can minimize least-squares loss given a data-set. While this problem is trivial in the low dimensional regime, it becomes more interesting in high dimensions where the population minimizer is assumed to lie on a manifold such as sparse vectors. We propose proje…
In stochastic optimization, the population risk is generally approximated by the empirical risk. However, in the large-scale setting, minimization of the empirical risk may be computationally restrictive. In this paper, we design an efficient algorithm to approximate the population risk minimizer in generalized linear …
Uncertainty sampling, a popular active learning algorithm, is used to reduce the amount of data required to learn a classifier, but it has been observed in practice to converge to different parameters depending on the initialization and sometimes to even better parameters than standard training on all the data. In this…
Most high-dimensional estimation and prediction methods propose to minimize a cost function (empirical risk) that is written as a sum of losses associated to each data point. In this paper we focus on the case of non-convex losses, which is practically important but still poorly understood. Classical empirical process …
We study the Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) algorithm for non-convex optimization. The algorithm performs stochastic gradient descent, where in each step it injects appropriately scaled Gaussian noise to the update. We analyze the algorithm's hitting time to an arbitrary subset of the parameter space. Two…
Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples and researchers have proposed many heuristic attack and defense mechanisms. We address this problem through the principled lens of distributionally robust optimization, which guarantees performance under adversarial input perturbations. By considering a Lagrangian …
This work considers the problem of binary classification: given training data x1,…,xn from a certain population, together with associated labels y1,…,yn∈{0,1}, determine the best label for an element x not among the training data. More specifically, this work considers a variant o…
We address the problem of correcting group discriminations within a score function, while minimizing the individual error. Each group is described by a probability density function on the set of profiles. We first solve the problem analytically in the case of two populations, with a uniform bonus-malus on the zones whe…
The landscape of empirical risk has been widely studied in a series of machine learning problems, including low-rank matrix factorization, matrix sensing, matrix completion, and phase retrieval. In this work, we focus on the situation where the corresponding population risk is a degenerate non-convex loss function, nam…
Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is a fundamental statistical tool for exploring the correlation structure between two sets of random variables. In this paper, motivated by recent success of applying CCA to learn low dimensional representations of high dimensional objects, we propose to quantify the estimation loss…