Most methods for learning with noisy labels require privileged knowledge such as noise transition matrices, clean subsets or pretrained feature extractors, resources typically unavailable when robustness is most needed. We propose Conformal Margin Risk Minimization (CMRM), a plug-and-play envelope framework that improves any classification loss under label noise by adding a single quantile-calibrated regularization term, with no privileged knowledge or training pipeline modification. CMRM measures the confidence margin between the observed label and competing labels, and thresholds it with a conformal quantile estimated per batch to focus training on high-margin samples while suppressing likely mislabeled ones. We derive a learning bound for CMRM under arbitrary label noise requiring only mild regularity of the margin distribution. Across five base methods and six benchmarks with synthetic and real-world noise, CMRM consistently improves accuracy (up to +3.39%), reduces conformal prediction set size (up to -20.44%) and does not hurt under 0% noise, showing that CMRM captures a method-agnostic uncertainty signal that existing mechanisms did not exploit.

Machine learning models are often susceptible to adversarial perturbations of their inputs. Even small perturbations can cause state-of-the-art classifiers with high standard accuracy to produce an incorrect prediction with high confidence. To better understand this phenomenon, we study adversarially robust learning from the viewpoint of generalization. We show that already in a simple natural data model, the sample complexity of robust learning can be significantly larger than that of standard learning. This gap is information theoretic and holds irrespective of the training algorithm or the model family. We complement our theoretical results with experiments on popular image classification datasets and show that a similar gap exists here as well. We postulate that the difficulty of training robust classifiers stems, at least partially, from this inherently larger sample complexity.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Weshowaseparation result: on one hand, if the query radiusλis strictly smaller than the adversary's perturbation budgetρ, then distribution-free robust learning is impossible for a widevarietyofconcept classes; ontheotherhand,thesettingλ=ρallowsusto develop robust ERM algorithms.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

This paper addresses the question of learning structured distributions from batches when a constant fraction of the batches might be corrupted. This problem has been of considerable recent interest. This paper studies the setting where the underlying distribution has additional structure (namely, piece polynomial density function), in which case more sample efficient algorithms are possible. This paper develops sample and computationally efficient algorithms for such settings. The reviewers were convinced that this paper makes important technical contributions in extending recent work on this problem to the structured setting.