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 revisit the question of reducing online learning to approximate optimization of the offline problem. In this setting, we give two algorithms with near-optimal performance in the full information setting: they guarantee optimal regret and require only poly-logarithmically many calls to the approximation oracle per it…
We define and study the problem of modular concept learning, that is, learning a concept that is a cross product of component concepts. If an element's membership in a concept depends solely on it's membership in the components, learning the concept as a whole can be reduced to learning the components. We analyze this …
New research shows fixed-budget best-arm identification cannot match static oracle performance.
problem Fixed-budget best-arm identification's performance limitations.
method Analysis of various adaptive and static algorithms for best-arm identification.
result For any algorithm, there exists at least one instance where the error decay rate is at most \((1 + \frac{\log(K)}{8})^{-1}\) times that of the static oracle.
We develop theory for using heuristics to solve computationally hard problems in differential privacy. Heuristic approaches have enjoyed tremendous success in machine learning, for which performance can be empirically evaluated. However, privacy guarantees cannot be evaluated empirically, and must be proven --- without…
High throughput genetic sequencing arrays with thousands of measurements per sample and a great amount of related censored clinical data have increased demanding need for better measurement specific model selection. In this paper we establish strong oracle properties of nonconcave penalized methods for nonpolynomial (N…
We discuss the problem of adaptive discrete-time signal denoising in the situation where the signal to be recovered admits a "linear oracle" -- an unknown linear estimate that takes the form of convolution of observations with a time-invariant filter. It was shown by Juditsky and Nemirovski (2009) that when the $\ell_2…
We study the problem of prediction for evolving graph data. We formulate the problem as the minimization of a convex objective encouraging sparsity and low-rank of the solution, that reflect natural graph properties. The convex formulation allows to obtain oracle inequalities and efficient solvers. We provide empirical…
High-dimensional data analysis has motivated a spectrum of regularization methods for variable selection and sparse modeling, with two popular classes of convex ones and concave ones. A long debate has been on whether one class dominates the other, an important question both in theory and to practitioners. In this pape…
In the regression setting, given a set of hyper-parameters, a model-estimation procedure constructs a model from training data. The optimal hyper-parameters that minimize generalization error of the model are usually unknown. In practice they are often estimated using split-sample validation. Up to now, there is an ope…
Q-learning methods represent a commonly used class of algorithms in reinforcement learning: they are generally efficient and simple, and can be combined readily with function approximators for deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, the behavior of Q-learning methods with function approximation is poorly understood,…
Conventional learning with expert advice methods assumes a learner is always receiving the outcome (e.g., class labels) of every incoming training instance at the end of each trial. In real applications, acquiring the outcome from oracle can be costly or time consuming. In this paper, we address a new problem of active…
The study quantifies the information needed for causal queries at different levels of Pearl's hierarchy.
problem How much additional information is needed for interventional and counterfactual queries compared to observational queries?
method Formalized via query-class description length, using Kolmogorov complexity of answer oracles induced by SCMs.
result Binary acyclic SCMs show a quadratic gap between observational and interventional descriptions, and a logarithmic gap between interventional and counterfactual descriptions.
The study examines how many samples are needed to minimize a noisy convex function with inaccurate gradient estimates.
problem Determining the number of samples needed to minimize a noisy convex function with inaccurate gradient estimates.
method Using Stochastic Convex Optimization as a case study, the study analyzes the relationship between the number of samples and the accuracy of gradient estimates.
result The study provides partial answers to the question, showing that a general analyst requires Ω(1/ε3) samples and that under certain assumptions, ildeΩ(1/ε2.5) samples are necessary for gradient descent to interact with the oracle.
We study the problem of interactively learning a binary classifier using noisy labeling and pairwise comparison oracles, where the comparison oracle answers which one in the given two instances is more likely to be positive. Learning from such oracles has multiple applications where obtaining direct labels is harder bu…
This paper studies the problem of inferring a global preference based on the partial rankings provided by many users over different subsets of items according to the Plackett-Luce model. A question of particular interest is how to optimally assign items to users for ranking and how many item assignments are needed to a…
Paper addresses online alignment of large language models under uncertain preference feedback.
problem Online alignment of large language models with misspecified preference feedback.
method Formulates an oracle-robust objective as a worst-case optimization problem for log-linear policies, and develops projected stochastic composite updates.
result Shows that the robust objective admits an exact closed-form decomposition and achieves O(ε−2) oracle complexity.
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of submodular set functions assuming minimization oracles of each summand function. Most existing approaches reformulate the problem as the convex minimization of the sum of the corresponding Lovász extensions and the squared Euclidean norm, leading to algorithms requiring …
We study the question of whether parallelization in the exploration of the feasible set can be used to speed up convex optimization, in the local oracle model of computation. We show that the answer is negative for both deterministic and randomized algorithms applied to essentially any of the interesting geometries and…