Lectures

Lecturer Varun Kanade
Hours Monday 15h-16h, Thursday 16h-18h
Location Lecture Theatre A

Note 1. Lecture notes will be posted for every lecture; however, they are not meant to be used as a substitute for actually reading the textbooks and other posted reading. Should you wish to read up ahead of lectures, you may follow the material posted on the Computational Learning Theory course from Hilary Term 2018. However, please make sure to make use of the most updated material when revising.

Note 2. 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.

Note 3. I expect the total number of lecture hours to be about 20. Lectures are scheduled for more hours to make it convenient to adjust the timetable.


Lecture Schedule

Date Topic Handouts Reading

8/10/2018 Introduction & PAC learning framework [slides]
[notes]

(KV) Chap 1
Valiant's paper

11/10/2018 Learning Conjunctions, Hardness of Learning 3-term DNF [notes]

(KV) Chap 1

15/10/2018 Learning 3-CNF, Consistent Learners, Occam's Razor [notes]

(KV) Chap 2

18/10/2018 VC dimension [notes]

(KV) Chap 2,3

22/10/2018 VC dimension [notes]

(KV) Chap 3

25/10/2018 Boosting; Cryptographic Hardness of Learning [notes]

Adaboost survey
Adaboost article

29/10/2018 Cryptographic Hardness; Learning using EQ+MQ [notes]

(KV) Chap. 6, 7

01/11/2018 Learning using EQ+MQ [notes]
[notes] (by J. Worrell)

(KV) Chap. 8

05/11/2018 Statistical Query Learning [notes]
(KV) Chap. 5

08/11/2018 Learning Real-Valued Functions [notes]
Convex Opt. book (Chap. 3.1)

12/11/2018 Rademacher Complexity [notes]
(MRT) Chap 3

15/11/2018 Neural Network
(Guest Lecture: Ben Worrell)
[notes]
Lecture Notes by M. Wolf (Chap 2)

19/11/2018 Agnostic Learning [notes]
Agnostic Learning article

22/11/2018 Agnostic Learning of Halfspaces; Mistake-bound Model [notes]
Agnostically Learning Halfspaces article
Littlestone's paper

26/11/2018 Online Learning with Expert Advice MWUA Survey

29/11/2018 Non-Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits Book Draft (A. Slivkins)
EXP.3 Paper