Online Learning with Improving Agents: Multiclass, Budgeted Agents and Bandit Learners

We investigate the recently introduced model of learning with improvements, where agents are allowed to make small changes to their feature values to be warranted a more desirable label. We extensively extend previously published results by providing combinatorial dimensions that characterize online learnability in this model, by analyzing the multiclass setup, learnability in a bandit feedback setup, modeling agents' cost for making improvements and more.

Robust Online Learning

We study the problem of learning robust classifiers where the classifier will receive a perturbed input. Unlike robust PAC learning studied in prior work, here the clean data and its label are also adversarially chosen. We formulate this setting as an online learning problem and consider both the realizable and agnostic learnability of hypothesis classes. We define a new dimension of classes and show it controls the mistake bounds in the realizable setting and the regret bounds in the agnostic setting. In contrast to the dimension that characterizes learnability in the PAC setting, our dimension is rather simple and resembles the Littlestone dimension. We generalize our dimension to multiclass hypothesis classes and prove similar results in the realizable case. Finally, we study the case where the learner does not know the set of allowed perturbations for each point and only has some prior on them.

Advancing Medical Representation Learning Through High-Quality Data

Despite the growing scale of medical Vision-Language datasets, the impact of dataset quality on model performance remains under-explored. We introduce Open-PMC, a high-quality medical dataset from PubMed Central, containing 2.2 million image-text pairs, enriched with image modality annotations, subfigures, and summarized in-text references. Notably, the in-text references provide richer medical context, extending beyond the abstract information typically found in captions. Through extensive experiments, we benchmark Open-PMC against larger datasets across retrieval and zero-shot classification tasks. Our results show that dataset quality-not just size-drives significant performance gains. We complement our benchmark with an in-depth analysis of feature representation. Our findings highlight the crucial role of data curation quality in advancing multimodal medical AI. We release Open-PMC, along with the trained models and our codebase.