Finite-Sample and Communication-Efficient Networked Information Aggregation

arXiv:2611.11032v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building on SODA 2026 work Kearns et al. (2026), we study learning in directed acyclic graphs in which each agent observes only a subset of the input coordinates and may use the predictions of its parents as additional features. In the finite-sample protocol, the message sent along each edge is the agent's prediction vector on a shared sample, so the communication cost is linear in the sample size $m$. In this paper we study this model under communication constraints. First, we revisit the finite-sample analysis of the full-message protocol. We identify a gap in the finite-sample proof of Kearns et al. (2026) and develop a different argument that establishes a finite-sample population-risk guarantee along paths satisfying deterministic $M$-coverage. Second, we introduce a shared-sketch protocol in which each agent sends a $k$-dimensional linear sketch of its prediction vector instead of the full $m$-dimensional message, where $k\ll m$. We analyze this protocol through a reduction to least squares on the compressed sample together with an oblivious subspace embedding argument. The resulting bound separates statistics from communication: the statistical term is still governed by the original sample size $m$, while the additional error due to compression is controlled by the sketch dimension $k$. For Gaussian sketches, we obtain an explicit high-probability population-risk bound, showing that row subsampling is not the only possible communication-statistics tradeoff for networked information aggregation.