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Conditional Predictive Inference for General Structured Data with Group Symmetries

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study distribution-free predictive inference for data with group symmetries, aiming to establish near-conditional coverage guarantees beyond exchangeability for structured data. While many predictive inference methods achieve a target coverage level, most provide marginal coverage. In practice, conditional predictive inference is often preferred, as it quantifies uncertainty for black-box predictions given observed attributes, thereby accommodating heterogeneity. Although many efforts have pursued efficient conditional coverage, existing methods rely on the i.i.d. or exchangeable assumption, often violated in structured settings such as networks, clusters, and imaging data. Recently, SymmPI introduced a unified approach to predictive inference under group symmetries beyond exchangeability; nevertheless, its guarantees remain marginal and do not account for population heterogeneity. To bridge this gap, we introduce C-SymmPI, a framework that achieves near-conditional coverage under general data structures with group symmetries, extending beyond exchangeability to cover networks, cluster-level data, and related structures. Inspired by relaxed multi-accuracy, our approach reformulates conditional coverage as miscoverage error over a user-specified function class. We establish theoretical guarantees under distributional invariance and distribution shift, and derive convergence rates for linear and RKHS function classes, recovering state-of-the-art results in the exchangeable setting as special cases. For computational efficiency, we develop two variants: a projection-based algorithm for high-dimensional observations, and a sampling-based algorithm for large or infinite groups. We demonstrate effectiveness on hierarchical and network data. Empirical results show that C-SymmPI delivers more informative and stable conditional coverage with improved accuracy compared to existing methods.


New Bounds for Hyperparameter Tuning of Regression Problems Across Instances

Neural Information Processing Systems

The task of tuning regularization coefficients in regularized regression models with provable guarantees across problem instances still poses a significant challenge in the literature. This paper investigates the sample complexity of tuning regularization parameters in linear and logistic regressions under โ„“1 and โ„“2-constraints in the data-driven setting. For the linear regression problem, by more carefully exploiting the structure of the dual function class, we provide a new upper bound for the pseudo-dimension of the validation loss function class, which significantly improves the best-known results on the problem. Remarkably, we also instantiate the first matching lower bound, proving our results are tight. For tuning the regularization parameters of logistic regression, we introduce a new approach to studying the learning guarantee via an approximation of the validation loss function class. We examine the pseudo-dimension of the approximation class and construct a uniform error bound between the validation loss function class and its approximation, which allows us to instantiate the first learning guarantee for the problem of tuning logistic regression regularization coefficients.


Selective Sampling and Imitation Learning via Online Regression

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the problem of Imitation Learning (IL) by actively querying noisy expert for feedback. While imitation learning has been empirically successful, much of prior work assumes access to noiseless expert feedback which is not practical in many applications. In fact, when one only has access to noisy expert feedback, algorithms that rely on purely offline data (non-interactive IL) can be shown to need a prohibitively large number of samples to be successful. In contrast, in this work, we provide an interactive algorithm for IL that uses selective sampling to actively query the noisy expert for feedback. Our contributions are twofold: First, we provide a new selective sampling algorithm that works with general function classes and multiple actions, and obtains the best-known bounds for the regret and the number of queries.



related work

Neural Information Processing Systems

Deterministic RLDeterministic system is often the starting case in the study of sample-efficient algorithms, where the issue of exploration and exploitation trade-off is more clearly revealed since both the transition kernel and reward function are deterministic. The seminal work [81] proposes a sample-efficient algorithm for Q-learning that works for a family of function classes. Recently, [21] studies the agnostic setting where the optimal Q-function can only be approximated by a function class with approximation error. The algorithm in [21] learns the optimal policy with the number of trajectories linear with the eluder dimension. Consider MDPM where the transition is deterministic. Assume the function class in Definition 3.1 satisfies Assumption 2.1 and Assumption 2.2. For any t (0,1), if d โ„ฆ(log(BW/ฮป))and n d poly(ฮบ,k,ฮป,BW,Bฯ•,H,log(d/t)), then with probability at least 1 tAlgorithm 1 returns the optimal policy ฯ€ .




Beyond the Return: Off-policy Function Estimation under User-specified Error-measuring Distributions

Neural Information Processing Systems

Off-policy evaluation often refers to two related tasks: estimating the expected return of a policy and estimating its value function (or other functions of interest, such as density ratios). While recent works on marginalized importance sampling (MIS) show that the former can enjoy provable guarantees under realizable function approximation, the latter is only known to be feasible under much stronger assumptions such as prohibitively expressive discriminators. In this work, we provide guarantees for off-policy function estimation under only realizability, by imposing proper regularization on the MIS objectives. Compared to commonly used regularization in MIS, our regularizer is much more flexible and can account for an arbitrary user-specified distribution, under which the learned function will be close to the groundtruth. We provide exact characterization of the optimal dual solution that needs to be realized by the discriminator class, which determines the datacoverage assumption in the case of value-function learning. As another surprising observation, the regularizer can be altered to relax the data-coverage requirement, and completely eliminate it in the ideal case with strong side information.