arXiv Machine Learning

Double Descent in Gradient Boosting Decision Trees via Split-Candidate Scaling

arXiv:2608. 03111v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Double descent is commonly studied by scaling an explicit capacity parameter, such as neural-network width.

arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

Vectorized Dynamic Histograms for Sparse Oblique Forests

arXiv:2603.00326v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse oblique (SPO), part of the top-ranked configuration of Google's Yggdrasil Decision Forests (YDF), improve the accuracy while maintaining int...

By Ariel Lubonja, Jungsang Yoon, Haoyin Xu, Yue Wan, Yilin Xu, Richard Stotz, Mathieu Guillame-Bert, Joshua T. Vogelstein, Randal Burns
arXiv AI
2d ago

Four Ways to Grow a Classifier and Why One of Them Cannot Learn

The paper investigates four ways to grow a classifier—adding a tree level, a hidden unit, a leaf split, and a statistically significant split—under a fixed protocol for tree‑structured and constructive models. It shows that the most natural method of deepening a soft decision tree by duplicating a leaf’s class distribution leaves the gradient of new gates identically zero, preventing learning, and proposes a small random perturbation as a fix. The other three growth decisions each provide a distinct benefit: fitting a new hidden unit to residual error yields a smaller network, splitting the leaf with the largest expected error adds sparsity, and requiring statistical significance before splitting adds no value and reduces accuracy.

By Cagri Temel