arXiv Machine Learning

A General Framework for Decision Trees via Bregman Divergences

arXiv:2606. 13984v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Decision trees are one of the fundamental tools in statistical learning due to their interpretability, flexibility, and their ability to adapt to nonlinear structures.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

Kernel of Partition Paths: A Unified Representation for Tree Ensembles

arXiv:2606. 18853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A recent line of work has reframed individual decision trees as linear models on engineered features associated with their splits, opening routes for oracle inequalities and feature-importance reinterpretation, but leaving open the question of what unified geometric object a forest induces when one indexes its feature map by nodes rather than by splits.

By Nicolas Mahler
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Universality of empirical risk minimization

arXiv:2202. 08832v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a general class of optimization problems with decision variable $\boldsymbol{\Theta} \in \mathbb{R}^{p \times k}$ and cost function which is the sum of $n$ terms, each dependent on $\boldsymbol{\Theta}$ through the $k$-dimensional projection $\boldsymbol{\Theta}^\top \boldsymbol{x}_i$, where $\boldsymbol{x}_i$, $i \leq n$ are i.

By Andrea Montanari, Basil Saeed
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 15

Learning and Testing Convex Functions

arXiv:2511. 11498v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider the problems of \emph{learning} and \emph{testing} real-valued convex functions over Gaussian space.

By Renato Ferreira Pinto Jr., Cassandra Marcussen, Elchanan Mossel, Shivam Nadimpalli
arXiv Machine Learning
6d ago

Linear-Core Surrogates: Smooth Loss Functions with Linear Rates for Classification and Structured Prediction

arXiv:2604. 27742v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A fundamental dichotomy in the theory of classification sets smoothness against statistical efficiency: smooth surrogate losses such as the logistic loss enable fast $O(1/T)$ optimization but yield slow square-root $H$-consistency bounds, while piecewise-linear losses like the Hinge loss achieve optimal linear $H$-consistency rates but are non-differentiable.

By Mehryar Mohri, Yutao Zhong
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

The Price of Hidden Curvature: An $\widetildeΩ (d^{5/4} \sqrt{T})$ Lower Bound for Bandit Convex Optimization

We establish a $\widetildeΩ(d^{5/4}\sqrt T)$ lower bound on the minimax expected regret of stochastic bandit convex optimization of $1$-Lipschitz functions on the Euclidean ball. This presents the first nontrivial regret lower bound that grows faster than $d\sqrt{T}$ for this problem, establishing that stochastic bandit convex optimization is fundamentally harder than linear bandits.

arXiv AI
Jun 18

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss

arXiv:2503. 08038v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels.

By Jiequan Cui, Beier Zhu, Qingshan Xu, Zhuotao Tian, Xiaojuan Qi, Bei Yu, Hanwang Zhang, Richang Hong
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 19

Fisher-Geometric Sharpness and the Implicit Bias of SGD toward Flat Minima

arXiv:2606. 20469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A widely held intuition in deep learning is that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) implicitly favors flat minima and that flat minima generalize better, but standard Euclidean measures of flatness such as the trace or maximum eigenvalue of the loss Hessian are not invariant under reparametrizations that preserve the network function, which undermines the theoretical foundations of this narrative.

By Md Sakir Ahmed, Kumaresh Sarmah, Hemen Dutta
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 3

Analytical Evaluation of DCA Convergence Properties for Minimizing Prediction Functions of Gaussian RBF Support Vector Regression

arXiv:2606. 03559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For nonconvex optimization problems whose objective is the prediction function of a trained Support Vector Regression (SVR) model with the Gaussian radial basis function (RBF) kernel (RBF-SVR), we present a framework that applies the difference of convex functions (DC) algorithm (DCA) by exploiting the analytical structure of the RBF kernel to construct an explicit DC decomposition.

By Yohei Kakimoto, Yuto Omae, Hirotaka Takahashi