Chain-of-thought prompting has demonstrated remarkable performance on various natural language reasoning tasks. However, it tends to perform poorly on tasks which requires solving problems harder than the exemplars shown in the prompts. To overcome this challenge of easy-to-hard generalization, we propose a novel prompting strategy, least-to-most prompting. The key idea in this strategy is to break down a complex problem into a series of simpler subproblems and then solve them in sequence. Solving each subproblem is facilitated by the answers to previously solved subproblems. Our experimental results on tasks related to symbolic manipulation, compositional generalization, and math reasoning reveal that least-to-most prompting is capable of generalizing to more difficult problems than those seen in the prompts. A notable finding is that when the GPT-3 code-davinci-002 model is used with least-to-most prompting, it can solve the compositional generalization benchmark SCAN in any split (including length split) with an accuracy of at least 99% using just 14 exemplars, compared to only 16% accuracy with chain-of-thought prompting. This is particularly noteworthy because neural-symbolic models in the literature that specialize in solving SCAN are trained on the entire training set containing over 15,000 examples. We have included prompts for all the tasks in the Appendix.

The broad practical impact of deep learning has heightened interest in many of its surprising characteristics: simple gradient methods applied to deep neural networks seem to efficiently optimize nonconvex criteria, reliably giving a near-perfect fit to training data, but exhibiting good predictive accuracy nonetheless [see Bartlett et al., 2021]. Optimization methodology is widely believed to affect statistical performance by imposing some kind of implicit regularization, and there has been considerable effort devoted to understanding the behavior of optimization methods and the nature of solutions that they find. For instance, Barrett and Dherin [2020] and Smith et al. [2021] show that discrete-time gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent can be viewed as gradient flow methods applied to penalized losses that encourage smoothness, and Soudry et al. [2018] amd Azulay et al. [2021] identify the implicit regularization imposed by gradient flow in specific examples, including linear networks. We consider Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a recently introduced [Foret et al., 2021] gradient optimization method that has exhibited substantial improvements in prediction performance for deep networks applied to image classification [Foret et al., 2021] and NLP [Bahri et al., 2022] problems. Also affiliated with University of California, Berkeley.

We construct a universally Bayes consistent learning rule that satisfies differential privacy (DP). We first handle the setting of binary classification and then extend our rule to the more general setting of density estimation (with respect to the total variation metric). The existence of a universally consistent DP learner reveals a stark difference with the distribution-free PAC model. Indeed, in the latter DP learning is extremely limited: even one-dimensional linear classifiers are not privately learnable in this stringent model. Our result thus demonstrates that by allowing the learning rate to depend on the target distribution, one can circumvent the above-mentioned impossibility result and in fact, learn \emph{arbitrary} distributions by a single DP algorithm. As an application, we prove that any VC class can be privately learned in a semi-supervised setting with a near-optimal \emph{labeled} sample complexity of $\tilde{O}(d/\varepsilon)$ labeled examples (and with an unlabeled sample complexity that can depend on the target distribution).

The amount of training-data is one of the key factors which determines the generalization capacity of learning algorithms. Intuitively, one expects the error rate to decrease as the amount of training-data increases. Perhaps surprisingly, natural attempts to formalize this intuition give rise to interesting and challenging mathematical questions. For example, in their classical book on pattern recognition, Devroye, Gyorfi, and Lugosi (1996) ask whether there exists a {monotone} Bayes-consistent algorithm. This question remained open for over 25 years, until recently Pestov (2021) resolved it for binary classification, using an intricate construction of a monotone Bayes-consistent algorithm. We derive a general result in multiclass classification, showing that every learning algorithm A can be transformed to a monotone one with similar performance. Further, the transformation is efficient and only uses a black-box oracle access to A. This demonstrates that one can provably avoid non-monotonic behaviour without compromising performance, thus answering questions asked by Devroye et al (1996), Viering, Mey, and Loog (2019), Viering and Loog (2021), and by Mhammedi (2021). Our transformation readily implies monotone learners in a variety of contexts: for example it extends Pestov's result to classification tasks with an arbitrary number of labels. This is in contrast with Pestov's work which is tailored to binary classification. In addition, we provide uniform bounds on the error of the monotone algorithm. This makes our transformation applicable in distribution-free settings. For example, in PAC learning it implies that every learnable class admits a monotone PAC learner. This resolves questions by Viering, Mey, and Loog (2019); Viering and Loog (2021); Mhammedi (2021).

We study deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on natural image data with entirely random labels. Despite its popularity in the literature, where it is often used to study memorization, generalization, and other phenomena, little is known about what DNNs learn in this setting. In this paper, we show analytically for convolutional and fully connected networks that an alignment between the principal components of network parameters and data takes place when training with random labels. We study this alignment effect by investigating neural networks pre-trained on randomly labelled image data and subsequently fine-tuned on disjoint datasets with random or real labels. We show how this alignment produces a positive transfer: networks pre-trained with random labels train faster downstream compared to training from scratch even after accounting for simple effects, such as weight scaling. We analyze how competing effects, such as specialization at later layers, may hide the positive transfer. These effects are studied in several network architectures, including VGG16 and ResNet18, on CIFAR10 and ImageNet.

How quickly can a given class of concepts be learned from examples? It is common to measure the performance of a supervised machine learning algorithm by plotting its "learning curve", that is, the decay of the error rate as a function of the number of training examples. However, the classical theoretical framework for understanding learnability, the PAC model of Vapnik-Chervonenkis and Valiant, does not explain the behavior of learning curves: the distribution-free PAC model of learning can only bound the upper envelope of the learning curves over all possible data distributions. This does not match the practice of machine learning, where the data source is typically fixed in any given scenario, while the learner may choose the number of training examples on the basis of factors such as computational resources and desired accuracy. In this paper, we study an alternative learning model that better captures such practical aspects of machine learning, but still gives rise to a complete theory of the learnable in the spirit of the PAC model. More precisely, we consider the problem of universal learning, which aims to understand the performance of learning algorithms on every data distribution, but without requiring uniformity over the distribution. The main result of this paper is a remarkable trichotomy: there are only three possible rates of universal learning. More precisely, we show that the learning curves of any given concept class decay either at an exponential, linear, or arbitrarily slow rates. Moreover, each of these cases is completely characterized by appropriate combinatorial parameters, and we exhibit optimal learning algorithms that achieve the best possible rate in each case. For concreteness, we consider in this paper only the realizable case, though analogous results are expected to extend to more general learning scenarios.

The classical PAC sample complexity bounds are stated for any Empirical Risk Minimizer (ERM) and contain an extra logarithmic factor $\log(1/{\epsilon})$ which is known to be necessary for ERM in general. It has been recently shown by Hanneke (2016) that the optimal sample complexity of PAC learning for any VC class C is achieved by a particular improper learning algorithm, which outputs a specific majority-vote of hypotheses in C. This leaves the question of when this bound can be achieved by proper learning algorithms, which are restricted to always output a hypothesis from C. In this paper we aim to characterize the classes for which the optimal sample complexity can be achieved by a proper learning algorithm. We identify that these classes can be characterized by the dual Helly number, which is a combinatorial parameter that arises in discrete geometry and abstract convexity. In particular, under general conditions on C, we show that the dual Helly number is bounded if and only if there is a proper learner that obtains the optimal joint dependence on $\epsilon$ and $\delta$. As further implications of our techniques we resolve a long-standing open problem posed by Vapnik and Chervonenkis (1974) on the performance of the Support Vector Machine by proving that the sample complexity of SVM in the realizable case is $\Theta((n/{\epsilon})+(1/{\epsilon})\log(1/{\delta}))$, where $n$ is the dimension. This gives the first optimal PAC bound for Halfspaces achieved by a proper learning algorithm, and moreover is computationally efficient.

We consider the classical problem of learning rates for classes with finite VC dimension. It is well known that fast learning rates are achievable by the empirical risk minimization algorithm (ERM) if one of the low noise/margin assumptions such as Tsybakov's and Massart's condition is satisfied. In this paper, we consider an alternative way of obtaining fast learning rates in classification if none of these conditions are met. We first consider Chow's reject option model and show that by lowering the impact of a small fraction of hard instances, fast learning rate is achievable in an agnostic model by a specific learning algorithm. Similar results were only known under special versions of margin assumptions. We also show that the learning algorithm achieving these rates is adaptive to standard margin assumptions and always satisfies the risk bounds achieved by ERM. Based on our results on Chow's model, we then analyze a particular family of VC classes, namely classes with finite combinatorial diameter. Using their special structure, we show that there is an improper learning algorithm that provides fast rates of convergence even in the (poorly understood) situations where ERM is suboptimal. This provides the first setup in which an improper learning algorithm may significantly improve the learning rates for non-convex losses. Finally, we discuss some implications of our techniques to the analysis of ERM.

The generalization bounds for stable algorithms is a classical question in learning theory taking its roots in the early works of Vapnik and Chervonenkis and Rogers and Wagner. In a series of recent breakthrough papers, Feldman and Vondrak have shown that the best known high probability upper bounds for uniformly stable learning algorithms due to Bousquet and Elisseeff are sub-optimal in some natural regimes. To do so, they proved two generalization bounds that significantly outperform the original generalization bound. Feldman and Vondrak also asked if it is possible to provide sharper bounds and prove corresponding high probability lower bounds. This paper is devoted to these questions: firstly, inspired by the original arguments of, we provide a short proof of the moment bound that implies the generalization bound stronger than both recent results. Secondly, we prove general lower bounds, showing that our moment bound is sharp (up to a logarithmic factor) unless some additional properties of the corresponding random variables are used. Our main probabilistic result is a general concentration inequality for weakly correlated random variables, which may be of independent interest.

Representation learning promises to unlock deep learning for the long tail of vision tasks without expansive labelled datasets. Y et, the absence of a unified yardstick to evaluate general visual representations hinders progress. Many sub-fields promise representations, but each has different evaluation protocols that are either too constrained (linear classification), limited in scope (ImageNet, CIFAR, Pascal-VOC), or only loosely related to representation quality (generation). We present the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VT AB): a diverse, realistic, and challenging benchmark to evaluate representations. VT AB embodies one principle: good representations adapt to unseen tasks with few examples . We run a large VT AB study of popular algorithms, answering questions like: How effective are ImageNet representation on nonstandard datasets? Is self-supervision useful if one already has labels? Deep learning has revolutionized computer vision. Distributed representations learned from ...