A Unified Model and Dimension for Interactive Estimation

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Main Conference Track

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Authors

Nataly Brukhim, Miro Dudik, Aldo Pacchiano, Robert E. Schapire

Abstract

We study an abstract framework for interactive learning called interactive estimation in which the goal is to estimate a target from its ``similarity'' to points queried by the learner.We introduce a combinatorial measure called Dissimilarity dimension which largely captures learnability in our model.We present a simple, general, and broadly-applicable algorithm, for which we obtain both regret and PAC generalization bounds that are polynomial in the new dimension. We show that our framework subsumes and thereby unifies two classic learning models:statistical-query learning and structured bandits. We also delineate how the Dissimilarity dimension is related to well-known parameters for both frameworks, in some cases yielding significantly improved analyses.