We provide a new information-theoretic generalization error bound that is exactly tight (i.e., matching even the constant) for the canonical quadratic Gaussian (location) problem. Most existing bounds are order-wise loose in this setting, which has raised concerns about the fundamental capability of information-theoretic bounds in reasoning the generalization behavior for machine learning. The proposed new bound adopts the individual-sample-based approach proposed by Bu et al., but also has several key new ingredients.

Successful training of data-intensive deep neural networks critically rely on vast, clean, and high-quality datasets. In practice however, their reliability diminishes, particularly with noisy, outlier-corrupted data samples encountered in testing. This challenge intensifies when dealing with anonymized, heterogeneous data sets stored across geographically distinct locations due to, e.g., privacy concerns. This present paper introduces robust learning frameworks tailored for centralized and federated learning scenarios.

In this paper, we propose a new class of local differential privacy (LDP) schemes based on combinatorial block designs for discrete distribution estimation. This class not only recovers many known LDP schemes in a unified framework of combinatorial block design, but also suggests a novel way of finding new schemes achieving the exactly optimal (or near-optimal) privacy-utility trade-off with lower communication costs.

Function approximation has experienced significant success in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). Despite a handful of progress on developing theory for nonstationary RL with function approximation under structural assumptions, existing work for nonstationary RL with general function approximation is still limited. In this work, we investigate two different approaches for nonstationary RL with general function approximation: confidence-set based algorithm and UCB-type algorithm.

In this paper, we study the computation of the rate-distortion-perception function (RDPF) for a multivariate Gaussian source assuming jointly Gaussian reconstruction under mean squared error (MSE) distortion and, respectively, Kullback–Leibler divergence, geometric Jensen-Shannon divergence, squared Hellinger distance, and squared Wasserstein-2 distance perception metrics.

The worst-case data-generating (WCDG) probability measure is introduced as a tool for characterizing the generalization capabilities of machine learning algorithms.

Linear regression is a fundamental and primitive problem in supervised machine learning, with applications ranging from epidemiology to finance. In this work, we propose methods for speeding up distributed linear regression. We do so by leveraging randomized techniques, while also ensuring security and straggler resiliency in asynchronous distributed computing systems. Specifically, we randomly rotate the basis of the system of equations and then subsample blocks, to simultaneously secure the information and reduce the dimension of the regression problem.

The framework of approximate differential privacy is considered, and augmented by leveraging the notion of “the total variation of a (privacy-preserving) mechanism” (denoted by $\eta $ -TV). With this refinement, an exact composition result is derived, and shown to be significantly tighter than the optimal bounds for differential privacy (which do not consider the total variation). Furthermore, it is shown that $(\varepsilon ,\delta )$ -DP with $\eta $ -TV is closed under subsampling. The induced total variation of commonly used mechanisms are computed.

We present the notion of reasonable utility for binary mechanisms, which applies to all utility functions in the literature. This notion induces a partial ordering on the performance of all binary differentially private (DP) mechanisms. DP mechanisms that are maximal elements of this ordering are optimal DP mechanisms for every reasonable utility. By looking at differential privacy as a randomized graph coloring, we characterize these optimal DP in terms of their behavior on a certain subset of the boundary datasets we call a boundary hitting set.

We study the problem of group testing with non-identical, independent priors. So far, the pooling strategies that have been proposed in the literature take the following approach: a hand-crafted test design along with a decoding strategy is proposed, and guarantees are provided on how many tests are sufficient in order to identify all infections in a population. In this paper, we take a different, yet perhaps more practical, approach: we fix the decoder and the number of tests, and we ask, given these, what is the best test design one could use?