excess risk
Provably Data-driven Lagrangian Relaxation for Mixed Integer Linear Programming
Le, Tung Quoc, Nguyen, Anh Tuan, Nguyen, Viet Anh
Lagrangian Relaxation (LR) is a powerful technique for solving large-scale Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP), particularly those with decomposable structures, such as vehicle routing or unit commitment problems. By relaxing the coupling constraints, LR enables parallel subproblem solving and often yields tighter dual bounds than standard linear programming relaxations, which is crucial for efficient branch-and-bound pruning. While recent empirical work has shown promising results using machine learning to predict these multipliers, a theoretical understanding of such methods remains an open question. In this work, we bridge this gap by analyzing the problem of learning LR through the lens of Data-driven Algorithm Design, i.e., a statistical learning problem over a distribution of problem instances. Our contributions are as follows: first, we derive a generalization bound of $\mathcal{O}(s^{1.5}/\sqrt{N})$ for the learned multipliers, where $s$ is the number of coupling constraints and $N$ is the sample size. Second, we provide a minimax lower-bound of $ฮฉ(s/\sqrt{N})$, proving that a linear dependency is unavoidable. Third, we constructively close this theoretical gap by proving that Stochastic Gradient Ascent (SGA) with averaging achieves the minimax optimal rate $ฮ(s/\sqrt{N})$. Finally, we extend our framework to the learning-to-warm-start setting, proving that it achieves a fast, minimax-optimal rate of $ฮ(s/N)$ and establishing a theoretical advantage over direct multiplier prediction.
The Privacy Price of Tail-Risk Learning: Effective Tail Sample Size in Differentially Private CVaR Optimization
Differential privacy changes the effective sample size governing CVaR learning. For tail mass $ฯ$, the privacy-relevant sample size is not $n$, but $nฯ$; equivalently, the effective private tail sample size is $ฮตnฯ$. Private CVaR excess risk decomposes into ordinary tail-risk statistical error and a privacy price. This decomposition is complete for scalar estimation and finite classes: scalar estimation has rate $ฮ(B \min\{1,(nฯ)^{-1/2}+(ฮตnฯ)^{-1}\})$, and finite classes of size $M$ have rate $ฮ(B \min\{1,\sqrt{\log(2M)/(nฯ)}+\log(2M)/(ฮตnฯ)\})$. These complete rates hold under pure DP, and their lower bounds extend to approximate DP in the stated small-$ฮด$ regimes. For convex Lipschitz learning, modular upper and lower reductions show that the CVaR-specific privacy term necessarily scales as $1/(ฮตnฯ)$, with dimension dependence inherited from private stochastic convex optimization. Together, these results identify ordinary private learning on $ฮ(nฯ)$ informative tail records as the canonical hard subproblem inside private CVaR learning.
TILT: Target-induced loss tilting under covariate shift
Yamamoto, Kakei, Wainwright, Martin J.
We introduce and analyze Target-Induced Loss Tilting (TILT) for unsupervised domain adaptation under covariate shift. It is based on a novel objective function that decomposes the source predictor as $f+b$, fits $f+b$ on labeled source data while simultaneously penalizing the auxiliary component $b$ on unlabeled target inputs. The resulting fit $f$ is deployed as the final target predictor. At the population level, we show that this target-side penalty implicitly induces relative importance weighting at the population level, but in terms of an estimand $b^*_f$ that is self-localized to the current error, and remains uniformly bounded for any source-target pair (even those with disjoint supports). We prove a general finite-sample oracle inequality on the excess risk, and use it to give an end-to-end guarantee for training with sparse ReLU networks. Experiments on controlled regression problems and shifted CIFAR-100 distillation show that TILT improves target-domain performance over source-only training, exact importance weighting, and relative density-ratio baselines, with a stable dependence on the regularization parameter.
Learning Curves and Benign Overfitting of Spectral Algorithms in Large Dimensions
Lu, Weihao, Lin, Qian, Xia, Yingcun, Huang, Dongming
Existing large-dimensional theory for spectral algorithms resolves either the optimally tuned point or the interpolation limit, but leaves the under-regularized regime unexplored. We study the learning curve and benign overfitting of spectral algorithms in the largedimensional setting where the sample size and dimension are of comparable order, i.e., n dฮณ for some ฮณ > 0. We first consider inner-product kernels on the sphere Sd 1 and establish a sharp asymptotic characterization of the excess risk across the full regularization path under various source conditions s 0, where smeasures the relative smoothness of the regression function. Our results reveal that the learning curve is not simply U-shaped but instead consists of three distinct regimes: over-regularized, under-regularized, and interpolation regimes. This characterization allows us to fully capture the benign overfitting phenomenon, demonstrating that benign overfitting arises consistently across both the under-regularized and interpolation regimes whenever sis positive but no larger than a critical threshold. We further show that, in the sufficiently regularized regime, the kernel learning curve is recovered by an associated sequence model. Finally, we extend the learning-curve analysis to large-dimensional KRR for a class of kernels on general domains in Rd whose low-degree eigenspaces satisfy spectral-scaling and hyper-contractivity conditions. Keywords: Spectral algorithms, learning curves, high dimension, benign overfitting. 1 Introduction Nonparametric regression studies the estimation of an unknown function f: Rd R from ni.i.d.
Fast rates for prediction with limited expert advice
We investigate the problem of minimizing the excess generalization error with respect to the best expert prediction in a finite family in the stochastic setting, under limited access to information. We assume that the learner only has access to a limited number of expert advices per training round, as well as for prediction. Assuming that the loss function is Lipschitz and strongly convex, we show that if we are allowed to see the advice of only one expert per round for T rounds in the training phase, or to use the advice of only one expert for prediction in the test phase, the worst-case excess risk is โฆ(1/ T) with probability lower bounded by a constant. However, if we are allowed to see at least two actively chosen expert advices per training round and use at least two experts for prediction, the fast rate O(1/T) can be achieved. We design novel algorithms achieving this rate in this setting, and in the setting where the learner has a budget constraint on the total number of observed expert advices, and give precise instance-dependent bounds on the number of training rounds and queries needed to achieve a given generalization error precision.