Open Problem: Recursive Teaching Dimension Versus VC Dimension
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Recursive Teaching Dimension (RTD) of a concept classC is a complexity parameter referring to the worst-case number of labelled examples needed to learn any target concept inC from a teacher following the recursive teaching model. It is the first teaching complexity notion for which interesting relationships to the VC dimension (VCD) have been established. In particular, for finite maximum classes of a given VCD d, the RTD equals d. To date, there is no concept class known for which the ratio of RTD over VCD exceeds 3=2. However, the only known upper bound on RTD in terms of VCD is exponential in the VCD and depends on the size of the concept class. We pose the following question: is the RTD upper-bounded by a function that grows only linearly in the VCD? Answering this question would further our understanding of the relationships between the complexity of teaching and the complexity of learning from randomly chosen examples. In addition, the answer to this question, whether positive or negative, is known to have implications on the study of the long-standing open sample compression conjecture, which claims that every concept class of VCD d has a sample compression scheme in which samples for concepts in the class are compressed to subsets of size no larger than d.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it