通过模仿实现不可知学习
Agnostic Learning by Imitating
Sílvia Casacuberta, Parikshit Gopalan, Varun Kanade, Omer Reingold, Konstantinos Stavropoulos, Pranay Tankala
AI 速览:作者证明不可知学习与多准确度(生成式不可区分)任务在计算复杂度上等价,并给出从多准确度到不可知学习的高效归约。
Given a class of machine learning models and sample access to a data distribution with binary labels, which computational task is harder: training a discriminative model that distinguishes positive and negative labels as well as the best member of the class, or training a generative model whose outputs are indistinguishable from real data by all members of the class? We prove that these two fundamental tasks in computational learning theory are not just closely related, but actually equivalent to each other in complexity. One direction of this equivalence was previously known. Indeed, the powerful regularity lemma in complexity theory gives an efficient oracle reduction from the indistinguishability task (a.k.a. multiaccuracy) to the distinguishing task (a.k.a. agnostic learning) in the style of boosting algorithms. Our main contribution is an efficient oracle reduction in the other direction. Taking this idea further, we show that a multiaccuracy oracle is a remarkably powerful primitive, achieving not just agnostic learning but also a wide range of seemingly more demanding learning objectives via similarly efficient and direct constructions. Our results crucially use the power of making adaptive queries to the oracle, and stand in stark contrast to prior work, which showed that post-processing a single multiaccurate predictor is insufficient for even weak forms of learning. On a technical level, we draw a connection between our (offline) problem and a version of no-regret learning in the online setting, which allows us to use follow-the-leader type algorithms to modify the label distribution and aggregate the predictions of the multiaccuracy oracle.