In this paper, we consider the problem of actively learning a linear classifier through query synthesis where the learner can construct artificial queries in order to estimate the true decision boundaries. This problem has recently gained a lot of interest in automated science and adversarial reverse engineering for which only heuristic algorithms are known. In such applications, queries can be constructed de novo to elicit information (e.g., automated science) or to evade detection with minimal cost (e.g., adversarial reverse engineering). We develop a general framework, called dimension coupling (DC), that 1) reduces a d-dimensional learning problem to d-1 low dimensional sub-problems, 2) solves each sub-problem efficiently, 3) appropriately aggregates the results and outputs a linear classifier, and 4) provides a theoretical guarantee for all possible schemes of aggregation. The proposed method is proved resilient to noise. We show that the DC framework avoids the curse of dimensionality: its computational complexity scales linearly with the dimension. Moreover, we show that the query complexity of DC is near optimal (within a constant factor of the optimum algorithm). To further support our theoretical analysis, we compare the performance of DC with the existing work. We observe that DC consistently outperforms the prior arts in terms of query complexity while often running orders of magnitude faster.
@cite_20: We abstract out the core search problem of active learning schemes, to better understand the extent to which adaptive labeling can improve sample complexity. We give various upper and lower bounds on the number of labels which need to be queried, and we prove that a popular greedy active learning rule is approximately as good as any other strategy for minimizing this number of labels.
For @math and when the distribution is uniform over the unit sphere @math it is very easy to see that the halving or bisection leads to @math . By using the same halving method, one can in principle extend the result to any dimension @math . To do so, we need to carefully construct the version space (i.e., the set of hypotheses consistent with the queries and outcomes) at each iteration and then find a query that halves the volume (in the uniform case) or the density (in the general case if the distribution is known) @cite_20 . Finding such a query in high dimension is very challenging.