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Main Authors: Ravari, Aryan Alavi Razavi, Mansouri, Farnam, Chen, Yuxin, Iverson, Valentio, Singla, Adish, Zilles, Sandra
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02080
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author Ravari, Aryan Alavi Razavi
Mansouri, Farnam
Chen, Yuxin
Iverson, Valentio
Singla, Adish
Zilles, Sandra
author_facet Ravari, Aryan Alavi Razavi
Mansouri, Farnam
Chen, Yuxin
Iverson, Valentio
Singla, Adish
Zilles, Sandra
contents We study learning under a two-step contrastive example oracle, as introduced by Mansouri et. al. (2025), where each queried (or sampled) labeled example is paired with an additional contrastive example of opposite label. While Mansouri et al. assume an idealized setting, where the contrastive example is at minimum distance of the originally queried/sampled point, we introduce and analyze a mechanism, parameterized by a non-decreasing noise function $f$, under which this ideal contrastive example is perturbed. The amount of perturbation is controlled by $f(d)$, where $d$ is the distance of the queried/sampled point to the decision boundary. Intuitively, this results in higher-quality contrastive examples for points closer to the decision boundary. We study this model in two settings: (i) when the maximum perturbation magnitude is fixed, and (ii) when it is stochastic. For one-dimensional thresholds and for half-spaces under the uniform distribution on a bounded domain, we characterize active and passive contrastive sample complexity in dependence on the function $f$. We show that, under certain conditions on $f$, the presence of contrastive examples speeds up learning in terms of asymptotic query complexity and asymptotic expected query complexity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02080
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Half-Spaces from Perturbed Contrastive Examples
Ravari, Aryan Alavi Razavi
Mansouri, Farnam
Chen, Yuxin
Iverson, Valentio
Singla, Adish
Zilles, Sandra
Machine Learning
We study learning under a two-step contrastive example oracle, as introduced by Mansouri et. al. (2025), where each queried (or sampled) labeled example is paired with an additional contrastive example of opposite label. While Mansouri et al. assume an idealized setting, where the contrastive example is at minimum distance of the originally queried/sampled point, we introduce and analyze a mechanism, parameterized by a non-decreasing noise function $f$, under which this ideal contrastive example is perturbed. The amount of perturbation is controlled by $f(d)$, where $d$ is the distance of the queried/sampled point to the decision boundary. Intuitively, this results in higher-quality contrastive examples for points closer to the decision boundary. We study this model in two settings: (i) when the maximum perturbation magnitude is fixed, and (ii) when it is stochastic. For one-dimensional thresholds and for half-spaces under the uniform distribution on a bounded domain, we characterize active and passive contrastive sample complexity in dependence on the function $f$. We show that, under certain conditions on $f$, the presence of contrastive examples speeds up learning in terms of asymptotic query complexity and asymptotic expected query complexity.
title Learning Half-Spaces from Perturbed Contrastive Examples
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02080