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Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Misha Khodak, Ilya Osadchiy, Keegan Harris, Maria-Florina Balcan, Kfir Y. Levy, Ron Meir, Steven Wu

We study online meta-learning with bandit feedback, with the goal of improving performance across multiple tasks if they are similar according to some natural similarity measure. As the first to target the adversarial online-within-online partial-information setting, we design meta-algorithms that combine outer learners to simultaneously tune the initialization and other hyperparameters of an inner learner for two important cases: multi-armed bandits (MAB) and bandit linear optimization (BLO). For MAB, the meta-learners initialize and set hyperparameters of the Tsallis-entropy generalization of Exp3, with the task-averaged regret improving if the entropy of the optima-in-hindsight is small. For BLO, we learn to initialize and tune online mirror descent (OMD) with self-concordant barrier regularizers, showing that task-averaged regret varies directly with an action space-dependent measure they induce. Our guarantees rely on proving that unregularized follow-the-leader combined with two levels of low-dimensional hyperparameter tuning is enough to learn a sequence of affine functions of non-Lipschitz and sometimes non-convex Bregman divergences bounding the regret of OMD.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Binhui Xie, Shuang Li, Qingju Guo, Chi Liu, Xinjing Cheng

Active learning, a label-efficient paradigm, empowers models to interactively query an oracle for labeling new data. In the realm of LiDAR semantic segmentation, the challenges stem from the sheer volume of point clouds, rendering annotation labor-intensive and cost-prohibitive. This paper presents Annotator, a general and efficient active learning baseline, in which a voxel-centric online selection strategy is tailored to efficiently probe and annotate the salient and exemplar voxel girds within each LiDAR scan, even under distribution shift. Concretely, we first execute an in-depth analysis of several common selection strategies such as Random, Entropy, Margin, and then develop voxel confusion degree (VCD) to exploit the local topology relations and structures of point clouds. Annotator excels in diverse settings, with a particular focus on active learning (AL), active source-free domain adaptation (ASFDA), and active domain adaptation (ADA). It consistently delivers exceptional performance across LiDAR semantic segmentation benchmarks, spanning both simulation-to-real and real-to-real scenarios. Surprisingly, Annotator exhibits remarkable efficiency, requiring significantly fewer annotations, e.g., just labeling five voxels per scan in the SynLiDAR → SemanticKITTI task. This results in impressive performance, achieving 87.8% fully-supervised performance under AL, 88.5% under ASFDA, and 94.4% under ADA. We envision that Annotator will offer a simple, general, and efficient solution for label-efficient 3D applications.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Guy Hacohen, Daphna Weinshall

In the domain of Active Learning (AL), a learner actively selects which unlabeled examples to seek labels from an oracle, while operating within predefined budget constraints. Importantly, it has been recently shown that distinct query strategies are better suited for different conditions and budgetary constraints. In practice, the determination of the most appropriate AL strategy for a given situation remains an open problem. To tackle this challenge, we propose a practical derivative-based method that dynamically identifies the best strategy for a given budget. Intuitive motivation for our approach is provided by the theoretical analysis of a simplified scenario. We then introduce a method to dynamically select an AL strategy, which takes into account the unique characteristics of the problem and the available budget. Empirical results showcase the effectiveness of our approach across diverse budgets and computer vision tasks.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Pier Giuseppe Sessa, Pierre Laforgue, Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi, Andreas Krause

Multitask learning is a powerful framework that enables one to simultaneously learn multiple related tasks by sharing information between them. Quantifying uncertainty in the estimated tasks is of pivotal importance for many downstream applications, such as online or active learning. In this work, we provide novel confidence intervals for multitask regression in the challenging agnostic setting, i.e., when neither the similarity between tasks nor the tasks' features are available to the learner. The obtained intervals do not require i.i.d. data and can be directly applied to bound the regret in online learning. Through a refined analysis of the multitask information gain, we obtain new regret guarantees that, depending on a task similarity parameter, can significantly improve over treating tasks independently. We further propose a novel online learning algorithm that achieves such improved regret without knowing this parameter in advance, i.e., automatically adapting to task similarity. As a second key application of our results, we introduce a novel multitask active learning setup where several tasks must be simultaneously optimized, but only one of them can be queried for feedback by the learner at each round. For this problem, we design a no-regret algorithm that uses our confidence intervals to decide which task should be queried. Finally, we empirically validate our bounds and algorithms on synthetic and real-world (drug discovery) data.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Taira Tsuchiya, Shinji Ito, Junya Honda

Adaptivity to the difficulties of a problem is a key property in sequential decision-making problems to broaden the applicability of algorithms. Follow-the-regularized-leader (FTRL) has recently emerged as one of the most promising approaches for obtaining various types of adaptivity in bandit problems. Aiming to further generalize this adaptivity, we develop a generic adaptive learning rate, called stability-penalty-adaptive (SPA) learning rate for FTRL. This learning rate yields a regret bound jointly depending on stability and penalty of the algorithm, into which the regret of FTRL is typically decomposed. With this result, we establish several algorithms with three types of adaptivity: sparsity, game-dependency, and best-of-both-worlds (BOBW). Despite the fact that sparsity appears frequently in real problems, existing sparse multi-armed bandit algorithms with $k$-arms assume that the sparsity level $s \leq k$ is known in advance, which is often not the case in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we first establish $s$-agnostic algorithms with regret bounds of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{sT})$ in the adversarial regime for $T$ rounds, which matches the existing lower bound up to a logarithmic factor. Meanwhile, BOBW algorithms aim to achieve a near-optimal regret in both the stochastic and adversarial regimes. Leveraging the SPA learning rate and the technique for $s$-agnostic algorithms combined with a new analysis to bound the variation in FTRL output in response to changes in a regularizer, we establish the first BOBW algorithm with a sparsity-dependent bound. Additionally, we explore partial monitoring and demonstrate that the proposed SPA learning rate framework allows us to achieve a game-dependent bound and the BOBW simultaneously.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Yu-Jie Zhang, Masashi Sugiyama

This paper investigates the logistic bandit problem, a variant of the generalized linear bandit model that utilizes a logistic model to depict the feedback from an action. While most existing research focuses on the binary logistic bandit problem, the multinomial case, which considers more than two possible feedback values, offers increased practical relevance and adaptability for use in complex decision-making problems such as reinforcement learning. In this paper, we provide an algorithm that enjoys both statistical and computational efficiency for the logistic bandit problem. In the binary case, our method improves the state-of-the-art binary logistic bandit method by reducing the per-round computation cost from $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ to $\mathcal{O}(1)$ with respect to the time horizon $T$, while still preserving the minimax optimal guarantee up to logarithmic factors. In the multinomial case, with $K+1$ potential feedback values, our algorithm achieves an $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(K\sqrt{T})$ regret bound with $\mathcal{O}(1)$ computational cost per round. The result not only improves the $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(K\sqrt{\kappa T})$ bound for the best-known tractable algorithm—where the large constant $\kappa$ increases exponentially with the diameter of the parameter domain—but also reduces the $\mathcal{O}(T)$ computational complexity demanded by the previous method.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Haoting Zhang, Jinghai He, Rhonda Righter, Zuo-Jun Shen, Zeyu Zheng

Contextual decision-making problems have witnessed extensive applications in various fields such as online content recommendation, personalized healthcare, and autonomous vehicles, where a core practical challenge is to select a suitable surrogate model for capturing unknown complicated reward functions. It is often the case that both high approximation accuracy and explicit uncertainty quantification are desired. In this work, we propose a neural network-accompanied Gaussian process (NN-AGP) model, which leverages neural networks to approximate the unknown and potentially complicated reward function regarding the contextual variable, and maintains a Gaussian process surrogate model with respect to the decision variable. Our model is shown to outperform existing approaches by offering better approximation accuracy thanks to the use of neural networks and possessing explicit uncertainty quantification from the Gaussian process. We also analyze the maximum information gain of the NN-AGP model and prove regret bounds for the corresponding algorithms. Moreover, we conduct experiments on both synthetic and practical problems, illustrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Volkan Cevher, Ashok Cutkosky, Ali Kavis, Georgios Piliouras, Stratis Skoulakis, Luca Viano

Motivated by alternating game-play in two-player games, we study an altenating variant of the \textit{Online Linear Optimization} (OLO). In alternating OLO, a \textit{learner} at each round $t \in [n]$ selects a vector $x^t$ and then an \textit{adversary} selects a cost-vector $c^t \in [-1,1]^n$. The learner then experiences cost $(c^t + c^{t-1})^\top x^t$ instead of $(c^t)^\top x^t$ as in standard OLO. We establish that under this small twist, the $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ lower bound on the regret is no longer valid. More precisely, we present two online learning algorithms for alternating OLO that respectively admit $\mathcal{O}((\log n)^{4/3} T^{1/3})$ regret for the $n$-dimensional simplex and $\mathcal{O}(\rho \log T)$ regret for the ball of radius $\rho>0$. Our results imply that in alternating game-play, an agent can always guarantee $\mathcal{\tilde{O}}((\log n)^{4/3} T^{1/3})$ regardless the strategies of the other agent while the regret bound improves to $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ in case the agent admits only two actions.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Yulian Wu, Xingyu Zhou, Youming Tao, Di Wang

We study private and robust multi-armed bandits (MABs), where the agent receives Huber's contaminated heavy-tailed rewards and meanwhile needs to ensure differential privacy. We consider both the finite $k$-th raw moment and the finite $k$-th central moment settings for heavy-tailed rewards distributions with $k\ge 2$. We first present its minimax lower bound, characterizing the information-theoretic limit of regret with respect to privacy budget, contamination level, and heavy-tailedness. Then, we propose a meta-algorithm that builds on a private and robust mean estimation sub-routine \texttt{PRM} that essentially relies on reward truncation and the Laplace mechanism. For the above two different heavy-tailed settings, we give corresponding schemes of \texttt{PRM}, which enable us to achieve nearly-optimal regrets. Moreover, our two proposed truncation-based or histogram-based \texttt{PRM} schemes achieve the optimal trade-off between estimation accuracy, privacy and robustness. Finally, we support our theoretical results and show the effectiveness of our algorithms with experimental studies.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Abhishek Sinha, Ativ Joshi, Rajarshi Bhattacharjee, Cameron Musco, Mohammad Hajiesmaili

We consider a fair resource allocation problem in the no-regret setting against an unrestricted adversary. The objective is to allocate resources equitably among several agents in an online fashion so that the difference of the aggregate $\alpha$-fair utilities of the agents achieved by an optimal static clairvoyant allocation and the online policy grows sublinearly with time. The problem inherits its difficulty from the non-separable nature of the global $\alpha$-fairness function. Previously, it was shown that no online policy could achieve a sublinear standard regret in this problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient online resource allocation policy, called Online Fair Allocation ($\texttt{OFA}$), that achieves sublinear $c_\alpha$-approximate regret with approximation factor $c_\alpha=(1-\alpha)^{-(1-\alpha)}\leq 1.445,$ for $0\leq \alpha < 1$. Our upper bound on the $c_\alpha$-regret for this problem exhibits a surprising \emph{phase transition} phenomenon -- transitioning from a power-law to a constant at the critical exponent $\alpha=\frac{1}{2}.$ Our result also resolves an open problem in designing an efficient no-regret policy for the online job scheduling problem in certain parameter regimes. Along the way, we introduce new algorithmic and analytical techniques, including greedy estimation of the future gradients for non-additive global reward functions and bootstrapping second-order regret bounds, which may be of independent interest.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Adam Block, Max Simchowitz, Russ Tedrake

The problem of piecewise affine (PWA) regression and planning is of foundational importance to the study of online learning, control, and robotics, where it provides a theoretically and empirically tractable setting to study systems undergoing sharp changes in the dynamics. Unfortunately, due to the discontinuities that arise when crossing into different ``pieces,'' learning in general sequential settings is impossible and practical algorithms are forced to resort to heuristic approaches. This paper builds on the recently developed smoothed online learning framework and provides the first algorithms for prediction and simulation in PWA systems whose regret is polynomial in all relevant problem parameters under a weak smoothness assumption; moreover, our algorithms are efficient in the number of calls to an optimization oracle. We further apply our results to the problems of one-step prediction and multi-step simulation regret in piecewise affine dynamical systems, where the learner is tasked with simulating trajectories and regret is measured in terms of the Wasserstein distance between simulated and true data. Along the way, we develop several technical tools of more general interest.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Zhekai Du, Jingjing Li

Active Domain Adaptation (ADA) has emerged as an attractive technique for assisting domain adaptation by actively annotating a small subset of target samples. Most ADA methods focus on measuring the target representativeness beyond traditional active learning criteria to handle the domain shift problem, while leaving the uncertainty estimation to be performed by an uncalibrated deterministic model. In this work, we introduce a probabilistic framework that captures both data-level and prediction-level uncertainties beyond a point estimate. Specifically, we use variational inference to approximate the joint posterior distribution of latent representation and model prediction. The variational objective of labeled data can be formulated by a variational autoencoder and a latent diffusion classifier, and the objective of unlabeled data can be implemented in a knowledge distillation framework. We utilize adversarial learning to ensure an invariant latent space. The resulting diffusion classifier enables efficient sampling of all possible predictions for each individual to recover the predictive distribution. We then leverage a t-test-based criterion upon the sampling and select informative unlabeled target samples based on the p-value, which encodes both prediction variability and cross-category ambiguity. Experiments on both ADA and Source-Free ADA settings show that our method provides more calibrated predictions than previous ADA methods and achieves favorable performance on three domain adaptation datasets.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Massil HIHAT, Stéphane Gaïffas, Guillaume Garrigos, Simon Bussy

We study multi-product inventory control problems where a manager makes sequential replenishment decisions based on partial historical information in order to minimize its cumulative losses. Our motivation is to consider general demands, losses and dynamics to go beyond standard models which usually rely on newsvendor-type losses, fixed dynamics, and unrealistic i.i.d. demand assumptions. We propose MaxCOSD, an online algorithm that has provable guarantees even for problems with non-i.i.d. demands and stateful dynamics, including for instance perishability. We consider what we call non-degeneracy assumptions on the demand process, and argue that they are necessary to allow learning.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Mingyu Xu, Zheng Lian, Lei Feng, Bin Liu, Jianhua Tao

Noisy partial label learning (noisy PLL) is an important branch of weakly supervised learning. Unlike PLL where the ground-truth label must conceal in the candidate label set, noisy PLL relaxes this constraint and allows the ground-truth label may not be in the candidate label set. To address this challenging problem, most of the existing works attempt to detect noisy samples and estimate the ground-truth label for each noisy sample. However, detection errors are unavoidable. These errors can accumulate during training and continuously affect model optimization. To this end, we propose a novel framework for noisy PLL with theoretical interpretations, called ``Adjusting Label Importance Mechanism (ALIM)''. It aims to reduce the negative impact of detection errors by trading off the initial candidate set and model outputs. ALIM is a plug-in strategy that can be integrated with existing PLL approaches. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on noisy PLL. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zeroQiaoba/ALIM.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Zeshuai Deng, Zhuokun Chen, Shuaicheng Niu, Thomas Li, Bohan Zhuang, Mingkui Tan

Image super-resolution (SR) aims to learn a mapping from low-resolution (LR) to high-resolution (HR) using paired HR-LR training images. Conventional SR methods typically gather the paired training data by synthesizing LR images from HR images using a predetermined degradation model, e.g., Bicubic down-sampling. However, the realistic degradation type of test images may mismatch with the training-time degradation type due to the dynamic changes of the real-world scenarios, resulting in inferior-quality SR images. To address this, existing methods attempt to estimate the degradation model and train an image-specific model, which, however, is quite time-consuming and impracticable to handle rapidly changing domain shifts. Moreover, these methods largely concentrate on the estimation of one degradation type (e.g., blur degradation), overlooking other degradation types like noise and JPEG in real-world test-time scenarios, thus limiting their practicality. To tackle these problems, we present an efficient test-time adaptation framework for SR, named SRTTA, which is able to quickly adapt SR models to test domains with different/unknown degradation types. Specifically, we design a second-order degradation scheme to construct paired data based on the degradation type of the test image, which is predicted by a pre-trained degradation classifier. Then, we adapt the SR model by implementing feature-level reconstruction learning from the initial test image to its second-order degraded counterparts, which helps the SR model generate plausible HR images. Extensive experiments are conducted on newly synthesized corrupted DIV2K datasets with 8 different degradations and several real-world datasets, demonstrating that our SRTTA framework achieves an impressive improvement over existing methods with satisfying speed. The source code is available at https://github.com/DengZeshuai/SRTTA.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Abishek Sankararaman, Balakrishnan Narayanaswamy

The real-time estimation of time-varying parameters from high-dimensional, heavy-tailed and corrupted data-streams is a common sub-routine in systems ranging from those for network monitoring and anomaly detection to those for traffic scheduling in data-centers. For estimation tasks that can be cast as minimizing a strongly convex loss function, we prove that an appropriately tuned version of the {\ttfamily clipped Stochastic Gradient Descent} (SGD) is simultaneously {\em(i)} adaptive to drift, {\em (ii)} robust to heavy-tailed inliers and arbitrary corruptions, {\em(iii)} requires no distributional knowledge and {\em (iv)} can be implemented in an online streaming fashion. All prior estimation algorithms have only been proven to posses a subset of these practical desiderata. A observation we make is that, neither the $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{t}\right)$ learning rate for {\ttfamily clipped SGD} known to be optimal for strongly convex loss functions of a \emph{stationary} data-stream, nor the $\mathcal{O}(1)$ learning rate known to be optimal for being adaptive to drift in a \emph{noiseless} environment can be used. Instead, a learning rate of $T^{-\alpha}$ for $ \alpha < 1$ where $T$ is the stream-length is needed to balance adaptivity to potential drift and to combat noise. We develop a new inductive argument and combine it with a martingale concentration result to derive high-probability under \emph{any learning rate} on data-streams exhibiting \emph{arbitrary distribution shift} - a proof strategy that may be of independent interest. Further, using the classical doubling-trick, we relax the knowledge of the stream length $T$. Ours is the first online estimation algorithm that is provably robust to heavy-tails, corruptions and distribution shift simultaneously. We complement our theoretical results empirically on synthetic and real data.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Xuchuang Wang, Qingyun Wu, Wei Chen, John C.S. Lui

We study the multi-fidelity multi-armed bandit ($\texttt{MF-MAB}$), an extension of the canonical multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem.$\texttt{MF-MAB}$ allows each arm to be pulled with different costs (fidelities) and observation accuracy.We study both the best arm identification with fixed confidence ($\texttt{BAI}$) and the regret minimization objectives.For $\texttt{BAI}$, we present (a) a cost complexity lower bound, (b) an algorithmic framework with two alternative fidelity selection procedures,and (c) both procedures' cost complexity upper bounds.From both cost complexity bounds of $\texttt{MF-MAB}$,one can recover the standard sample complexity bounds of the classic (single-fidelity) MAB.For regret minimization of $\texttt{MF-MAB}$, we propose a new regret definition, prove its problem-independent regret lower bound $\Omega(K^{1/3}\Lambda^{2/3})$ and problem-dependent lower bound $\Omega(K\log \Lambda)$, where $K$ is the number of arms and $\Lambda$ is the decision budget in terms of cost, and devise an elimination-based algorithm whose worst-cost regret upper bound matches its corresponding lower bound up to some logarithmic terms and, whose problem-dependent bound matches its corresponding lower bound in terms of $\Lambda$.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Yichen Xie, Mingyu Ding, Masayoshi TOMIZUKA, Wei Zhan

A desirable data selection algorithm can efficiently choose the most informative samples to maximize the utility of limited annotation budgets. However, current approaches, represented by active learning methods, typically follow a cumbersome pipeline that iterates the time-consuming model training and batch data selection repeatedly. In this paper, we challenge this status quo by designing a distinct data selection pipeline that utilizes existing general-purpose models to select data from various datasets with a single-pass inference without the need for additional training or supervision. A novel free data selection (FreeSel) method is proposed following this new pipeline. Specifically, we define semantic patterns extracted from inter-mediate features of the general-purpose model to capture subtle local information in each image. We then enable the selection of all data samples in a single pass through distance-based sampling at the fine-grained semantic pattern level. FreeSel bypasses the heavy batch selection process, achieving a significant improvement in efficiency and being 530x faster than existing active learning methods. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of FreeSel on various computer vision tasks.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Juan M. Cardenas, Ben Adcock, Nick Dexter

We introduce a general framework for active learning in regression problems. Our framework extends the standard setup by allowing for general types of data, rather than merely pointwise samples of the target function. This generalization covers many cases of practical interest, such as data acquired in transform domains (e.g., Fourier data), vector-valued data (e.g., gradient-augmented data), data acquired along continuous curves, and, multimodal data (i.e., combinations of different types of measurements). Our framework considers random sampling according to a finite number of sampling measures and arbitrary nonlinear approximation spaces (model classes). We introduce the concept of \textit{generalized Christoffel functions} and show how these can be used to optimize the sampling measures. We prove that this leads to near-optimal sample complexity in various important cases. This paper focuses on applications in scientific computing, where active learning is often desirable, since it is usually expensive to generate data. We demonstrate the efficacy of our framework for gradient-augmented learning with polynomials, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) using generative models and adaptive sampling for solving PDEs using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs).

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

James Cheshire, Vincent Laurent, Stephan Clémençon

In this paper, we develop an active learning framework for the bipartite ranking problem.Motivated by numerous applications, ranging from supervised anomaly detection to credit-scoring through the design of medical diagnosis support systems, and usually formulated as the problem of optimizing (a scalar summary of) the ROC curve, bipartite ranking has been the subject of much attention in the passive context. Various dedicated algorithms have been recently proposed and studied by the machine-learning community. In contrast, active bipartite ranking rule is poorly documented in the literature. Due to its global nature, a strategy for labeling sequentially data points that are difficult to rank w.r.t. to the others is required. This learning task is much more complex than binary classification, for which many active algorithms have been designed. It is the goal of this article to provide a rigorous formulation of such a selective sampling approach. We propose a dedicated algorithm, referred to as active-rank, which aims to minimise the distance between the ROC curve of the ranking function built and the optimal one, w.r.t. the sup norm. We show that, for a fixed confidence level $\epsilon$ and probability $\delta$, active-rank is PAC$(\epsilon,\delta)$. In addition, we provide a problem dependent upper bound on the expected sampling time of active-rank and also demonstrate a problem dependent lower bound on the expected sampling time of any PAC$(\epsilon,\delta)$ algorithm. Beyond the theoretical analysis carried out, numerical results are presented, providing strong empirical evidence of the performance of the algorithm proposed, which compares favorably with more naive approaches.