Teaching and Learning under Deductive Errors

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Telle, Jan Arne, Håvardstun, Brigt, Hernandez-Orallo, Jose
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Telle, Jan Arne
Håvardstun, Brigt
Hernandez-Orallo, Jose
author_facet Telle, Jan Arne
Håvardstun, Brigt
Hernandez-Orallo, Jose
contents Most models of machine teaching and learning assume the learner makes no errors in its internal deductive inference. However, humans and large language models in few-shot learning regimes are two important examples of learners where this does not hold. They fail on some consistency checks, and they can fail stochastically. In this paper we introduce a teaching and learning framework that takes these deductive errors into account. We specifically study the case of machine teaching, as different characterizations of the teacher can account for both machine teaching and learning. In an overhauled Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) setting, we study theoretically that, for some estimated error level, the teacher must find a PAC teaching set that with high probability will lead the learner to guess a hypothesis that is approximately correct. We study the computational complexity of six different problems related to computing optimal PAC teaching sets. We give XP algorithms parametrized by size of teaching set, with tight runtime bounds under standard complexity assumptions like ETH. These results are complemented with a small experimental study of which teaching and learning protocols can best represent the observed behavior in some LLM teaching sessions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_13384
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Teaching and Learning under Deductive Errors
Telle, Jan Arne
Håvardstun, Brigt
Hernandez-Orallo, Jose
Machine Learning
68Q32 68Q17 68T07 68Q25 68Q32 68T07
Most models of machine teaching and learning assume the learner makes no errors in its internal deductive inference. However, humans and large language models in few-shot learning regimes are two important examples of learners where this does not hold. They fail on some consistency checks, and they can fail stochastically. In this paper we introduce a teaching and learning framework that takes these deductive errors into account. We specifically study the case of machine teaching, as different characterizations of the teacher can account for both machine teaching and learning. In an overhauled Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) setting, we study theoretically that, for some estimated error level, the teacher must find a PAC teaching set that with high probability will lead the learner to guess a hypothesis that is approximately correct. We study the computational complexity of six different problems related to computing optimal PAC teaching sets. We give XP algorithms parametrized by size of teaching set, with tight runtime bounds under standard complexity assumptions like ETH. These results are complemented with a small experimental study of which teaching and learning protocols can best represent the observed behavior in some LLM teaching sessions.
title Teaching and Learning under Deductive Errors
topic Machine Learning
68Q32 68Q17 68T07 68Q25 68Q32 68T07
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13384