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### Approximation of Functions over Manifolds: A Moving Least-Squares Approach

We present an algorithm for approximating a function defined over a $d$-dimensional manifold utilizing only noisy function values at locations sampled from the manifold with noise. To produce the approximation we do not require any knowledge regarding the manifold other than its dimension $d$. The approximation scheme is based upon the Manifold Moving Least-Squares (MMLS). The proposed algorithm is resistant to noise in both the domain and function values. Furthermore, the approximant is shown to be smooth and of approximation order of $\mathcal{O}(h^{m+1})$ for non-noisy data, where $h$ is the mesh size with respect to the manifold domain, and $m$ is the degree of a local polynomial approximation utilized in our algorithm. In addition, the proposed algorithm is linear in time with respect to the ambient-space's dimension. Thus, in case of extremely large ambient space dimension, we are able to avoid the curse of dimensionality without having to perform non-linear dimension reduction, which introduces distortions to the manifold data. Using numerical experiments, we compare the presented method to state-of-the-art algorithms for regression over manifolds and show its potential.

### A Generalization Bound for Online Variational Inference

Bayesian inference provides an attractive online-learning framework to analyze sequential data, and offers generalization guarantees which hold even under model mismatch and with adversaries. Unfortunately, exact Bayesian inference is rarely feasible in practice and approximation methods are usually employed, but do such methods preserve the generalization properties of Bayesian inference? In this paper, we show that this is indeed the case for some variational inference (VI) algorithms. We propose new online, tempered VI algorithms and derive their generalization bounds. Our theoretical result relies on the convexity of the variational objective, but we argue that our result should hold more generally and present empirical evidence in support of this. Our work in this paper presents theoretical justifications in favor of online algorithms that rely on approximate Bayesian methods.