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Main Authors: Diakonikolas, Ilias, Kane, Daniel M., Ma, Mingchen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00508
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author Diakonikolas, Ilias
Kane, Daniel M.
Ma, Mingchen
author_facet Diakonikolas, Ilias
Kane, Daniel M.
Ma, Mingchen
contents We study the problem of learning general (i.e., not necessarily homogeneous) halfspaces under the Gaussian distribution on $R^d$ in the presence of some form of query access. In the classical pool-based active learning model, where the algorithm is allowed to make adaptive label queries to previously sampled points, we establish a strong information-theoretic lower bound ruling out non-trivial improvements over the passive setting. Specifically, we show that any active learner requires label complexity of $\tildeΩ(d/(\log(m)ε))$, where $m$ is the number of unlabeled examples. Specifically, to beat the passive label complexity of $\tilde{O} (d/ε)$, an active learner requires a pool of $2^{poly(d)}$ unlabeled samples. On the positive side, we show that this lower bound can be circumvented with membership query access, even in the agnostic model. Specifically, we give a computationally efficient learner with query complexity of $\tilde{O}(\min\{1/p, 1/ε\} + d\cdot polylog(1/ε))$ achieving error guarantee of $O(opt)+ε$. Here $p \in [0, 1/2]$ is the bias and $opt$ is the 0-1 loss of the optimal halfspace. As a corollary, we obtain a strong separation between the active and membership query models. Taken together, our results characterize the complexity of learning general halfspaces under Gaussian marginals in these models.
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publishDate 2024
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spellingShingle Active Learning of General Halfspaces: Label Queries vs Membership Queries
Diakonikolas, Ilias
Kane, Daniel M.
Ma, Mingchen
Machine Learning
We study the problem of learning general (i.e., not necessarily homogeneous) halfspaces under the Gaussian distribution on $R^d$ in the presence of some form of query access. In the classical pool-based active learning model, where the algorithm is allowed to make adaptive label queries to previously sampled points, we establish a strong information-theoretic lower bound ruling out non-trivial improvements over the passive setting. Specifically, we show that any active learner requires label complexity of $\tildeΩ(d/(\log(m)ε))$, where $m$ is the number of unlabeled examples. Specifically, to beat the passive label complexity of $\tilde{O} (d/ε)$, an active learner requires a pool of $2^{poly(d)}$ unlabeled samples. On the positive side, we show that this lower bound can be circumvented with membership query access, even in the agnostic model. Specifically, we give a computationally efficient learner with query complexity of $\tilde{O}(\min\{1/p, 1/ε\} + d\cdot polylog(1/ε))$ achieving error guarantee of $O(opt)+ε$. Here $p \in [0, 1/2]$ is the bias and $opt$ is the 0-1 loss of the optimal halfspace. As a corollary, we obtain a strong separation between the active and membership query models. Taken together, our results characterize the complexity of learning general halfspaces under Gaussian marginals in these models.
title Active Learning of General Halfspaces: Label Queries vs Membership Queries
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00508