Computational Learning Theory
Review for NeurIPS paper: Reducing Adversarially Robust Learning to Non-Robust PAC Learning
Summary and Contributions: Robust learning has got a lot of attention over the last decade. This paper is about *test-time attacks (called evasion attacks or attacks finding "adversarial examples"). Such attacks are studied widely from experimental point of view, but more recently theoretical results are being proven for understanding how, and when, learning under such adversarial perturbations are possible. Montasser et al (MHS COLT 19) showed that if a problem is PAC learnable, i.e., has finite VC dimension d, then it is also robustly PAC learnable, though the sample complexity (in their proof) could be as large as exponential(d). This paper's main contribution is an alternative proof of the result of MHS, by showing how to reduce the task of robust learning to the task of normal PAC learning.
Reducing Adversarially Robust Learning to Non-Robust PAC Learning
We study the problem of reducing adversarially robust learning to standard PAC learning, i.e. the complexity of learning adversarially robust predictors using access to only a black-box non-robust learner. We give a reduction that can robustly learn any hypothesis class C using any non-robust learner A for C. The number of calls to A depends logarithmically on the number of allowed adversarial perturbations per example, and we give a lower bound showing this is unavoidable.
Review for NeurIPS paper: Reducing Adversarially Robust Learning to Non-Robust PAC Learning
All the reviewers agreed that the paper provides a novel and important theoretical result. Specifically, one of the main contributions of the paper is to show that if a problem is PAC learnable, i.e., has finite VC dimension d, then it i also robustly PAC learnable. The result had already been proven last year, however, this paper provides a novel framework to prove it by showing how to reduce the task of robust learning to the task of normal PAC learning (it should be noted that the reduction may not be efficient (i.e., polynomial time) but still is important from the theoretical and statistical perspective. The reviewers also had some suggestions for the revised version of the paper which are reflected in the'r updated reviews.
Locally Private Learning without Interaction Requires Separation
We consider learning under the constraint of local differential privacy (LDP). For many learning problems known efficient algorithms in this model require many rounds of communication between the server and the clients holding the data points. Yet multi-round protocols are prohibitively slow in practice due to network latency and, as a result, currently deployed large-scale systems are limited to a single round. Despite significant research interest, very little is known about which learning problems can be solved by such non-interactive systems. The only lower bound we are aware of is for PAC learning an artificial class of functions with respect to a uniform distribution [39].
Private Learning of Halfspaces: Simplifying the Construction and Reducing the Sample Complexity Full Version Uri Stemmer
The building block for our learner is a new differentially private algorithm for approximately solving the linear feasibility problem: Given a feasible collection of m linear constraints of the form Ax b, the task is to privately identify a solution x that satisfies most of the constraints. Our algorithm is iterative, where each iteration determines the next coordinate of the constructed solution x.
Smart Cubing for Graph Search: A Comparative Study
Kirchweger, Markus, Xia, Hai, Peitl, Tomรกลก, Szeider, Stefan
Propositional satisfiability (SAT) solvers based on conflict-driven clause learning can solve huge instances with millions of variables and clauses [Fichte et al., 2023a]. However, for hard instances, particularly in combinatorial problems, parallelization becomes necessary. The cube-and-conquer technique has proven highly effective for such problems, most notably in resolving the Pythagorean triples conjecture [Heule et al., 2016]. In cube-and-conquer, a look-ahead solver first partitions the search space into disjoint subproblems via cubes (partial assignments), which are then solved independently by CDCL solvers. This independence enables efficient parallel solving. When encoding combinatorial problems into SAT, particularly those involving graphs, we often encounter highly symmetric search spaces. Many mutually isomorphic graphs satisfy the same constraints, but a solver needs to check only one representative, the canonical element, from each isomorphism class. Standard CDCL solvers cannot leverage these symmetries, and static symmetry breaking methods cannot break all symmetries [Codish et al., 2019]. SAT Modulo Symmetries (SMS) [Kirchweger and Szeider, 2021; Kirchweger and Szeider, 2024] addresses this limitation through dynamic symmetry breaking, using a custom propagator that learns symmetry-breaking predicates during the search.
Generalization Bounds for Gradient Methods via Discrete and Continuous Prior Xuanyuan Luo
Proving algorithm-dependent generalization error bounds for gradient-type optimization methods has attracted significant attention recently in learning theory. However, most existing trajectory-based analyses require either restrictive assumptions on the learning rate (e.g., fast decreasing learning rate), or continuous injected noise (such as the Gaussian noise in Langevin dynamics).
On The Structure of Parametric Tournaments with Application to Ranking from Pairwise Comparisons
We consider the classical problem of finding the minimum feedback arc set on tournaments (MFAST). The problem is NP-hard in general and we study it for important classes of tournaments that arise naturally in the problem of learning to rank from pairwise comparisons. Specifically, we consider tournaments classes that arise out of parametric preference matrices that can lead to cyclic preference relations. We investigate their structural properties via forbidden sub tournament configurations. Towards this, we introduce Tournament Dimension - a combinatorial parameter that characterizes the size of a forbidden configuration for rank r tournament classes i.e., classes that arise out of pairwise preference matrices which lead to rank r skew-symmetric matrices under a suitable link function.
On The Structure of Parametric Tournaments with Application to Ranking from Pairwise Comparisons
We consider the classical problem of finding the minimum feedback arc set on tournaments (MFAST). The problem is NP-hard in general and we study it for important classes of tournaments that arise naturally in the problem of learning to rank from pairwise comparisons. Specifically, we consider tournaments classes that arise out of parametric preference matrices that can lead to cyclic preference relations. We investigate their structural properties via forbidden sub tournament configurations. Towards this, we introduce Tournament Dimension - a combinatorial parameter that characterizes the size of a forbidden configuration for rank r tournament classes i.e., classes that arise out of pairwise preference matrices which lead to rank r skew-symmetric matrices under a suitable link function.
ae3539867aaeec609a4260c6feb725f4-AuthorFeedback.pdf
Thank you all for your thoughtful comments; we address your concerns below. The MDL principle formalizes Occam's razor and is a We will add the discussion of such relevant studies to section 1. TLT values for GQA are much lower than that for CLEVR (over 4 for MAC(8)). We will add these results and accompanying visualizations to appendix. We found that during evaluation, rk4 solves all the dynamics generated from CLEVR dataset. We will add these results to section 5.2.