Lectures
Lecturer | Varun Kanade |
Hours | Mon, Tue, Thu: 4-5pm |
Location | Lecture Theatre A |
Notes | (Lecture Notes) |
Note 1. I only expect there to be about 20 hours of lectures in total. I have scheduled more hours and intend to have longer lectures at the start of term to ensure that there is enough time left if rescheduling is necessary.
Note 2. A set of lecture notes (LN) covering the entire course will be posted. These are not meant to be used as a substitute for reading the recommended textbooks and other posted reading. There might be some delay in updating the lecture notes. Should you wish to read up ahead of lectures, you may follow the material posted on the Computational Learning Theory course from Michaelmas Term 2021. The only difference between the MT2021 notes and the new ones is an attempt at serialization. Please make sure to make use of the most updated material when revising.
Note 3. There will be parts of suggested reading material that you struggle with or may seem not directly related to what we covered in the lecture. I suggest you skip these sections and only return to them once you've understood the material covered in the lecture and want to increase your understanding further.
Lecture Schedule
Date | Topic | Reading |
---|---|---|
10/10/2022 | Setting up the PAC Learning Framework | Chap 1.1-2 (LN) Chap 1.1-2 (KV) |
11/10/2022 | PAC Learning Conjunctions | Chap 1.2-3 (LN) Chap 1.2-3 (KV) Valiant's paper |
13/10/2022 | Hardness of learing 3-term DNF | Chap 1.4-8 (LN) Chap 1.4-7 (KV) |
17/10/2022 | Occam's Razor | Chap 2 (LN) Chap 2 (KV) |
18/10/2022 | VC Dimension; Sauer's Lemma | Chap 3.1-3.2, 3.5 (LN) Chap 3.1-4 (KV) |
20/10/2022 | VC Dimension; Sample Complexity Upper Bounds | Chap 3.3 (LN) Chap 3.5 (KV) |
24/10/2022 | VC Dimension; Sample Complexity Lower Bounds | Chap 3.4 (LN) Chap 3.6 (KV) |
25/10/2022 | Boosting |
Chap 4 (LN) Adaboost survey Adaboost article |
27/10/2022 | Cryptographic Hardness of Learning | Chap 5 (LN) Chap 6 (KV) |
31/10/2022 | Cryptographic Hardness of Learning; Exact Learning using MQ+EQ |
Chap 5, 6.1-2 (LN) Chap 6, 8.1-2 (KV) Article on shallow circuits for arithmetic operations |
01/11/2022 | Learning DFAs |
Chap 6.3 (LN) Chap 8.3 (KV) |
03/11/2022 | Reductions; Separations; RCN |
Chap 7.1 (LN) Chap 7 (KV), Chap 5.1-2 |
07/11/2022 | Learning with RCN; SQ Learning |
Chap 7.2 (LN) Chap 5.3-4 (KV) |
08/11/2022 | Hardness of SQ Learning PARITIES |
Chap 7.3 (LN) |
10/11/2022 | Learning Real-Valued Functions |
Chap 8.1-2 (LN) [older notes] Convex Opt. book (Chap. 3.1) |
14/11/2022 | Learning LMs, GLMs |
Chap 8.4-5 (LN) [older notes] Chap 3 (MRT) |
15/11/2022 | Rademacher Complexity |
Chap 8.3 (LN) [older notes] Chap 3 (MRT) |
17/11/2021 | Online Learning Mistake-bounded Learning |
Chap 9.1-3 (LN) [older notes] [even older notes] |
21/11/2021 | Perceptron and Winnow |
Chap 9.4-5 (LN) [older notes] [even older notes] Littlestone's paper |
22/11/2021 | Learning with Expert Advice |
Chap 10 (LN) [older notes] MWUA Survey |