Query Complexity of Learning Axis-Aligned Partitions

Abstract

This work establishes the query complexity of learning high-dimensional boxes in the exact query learning setting. Let $X \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ be a set of $n$ points, labeled by a collection of $k$ boxes: the label of each point in $X$ is determined by the unique box containing it. A learner aims to exactly recover the labels for every point in $X$ given access to a label oracle. We consider three increasingly-structured settings. In the most general setting, there are no conditions on the boxes, and they may overlap. We show that CAL (Cohn-Atlas-Ladner 1994), a classical active learning algorithm, is minimax-optimal with query complexity $Θ(kd \log (n/kd))$. When the boxes are disjoint, we examine two regimes. In the large-$k$ regime, CAL remains minimax-optimal. For the constant-$k$ regime, an optimized variant of the Halving algorithm (Hegedüs 1995) can beat CAL by a $\log(d)$ factor. Finally, in the most-structured settings, the boxes correspond to the leaves of a constant-sized decision tree. We prove a tight query complexity of $Θ(d + \log n)$ that is additive in $d$ and $\log n$, generalizing a recent result (Black-Larsen-Mazumdar-Saha-So 2026) that establishes the query complexity of learning decision stumps.