Cryptographic Hardness of Learning Halfspaces with Massart Noise
Authors: Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel Kane, Pasin Manurangsi, Lisheng Ren
NeurIPS 2022 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details
| Reproducibility Variable | Result | LLM Response |
|---|---|---|
| Research Type | Theoretical | We study the complexity of PAC learning halfspaces in the presence of Massart noise. In this problem, we are given i.i.d. labeled examples (x, y) RN { 1}, where the distribution of x is arbitrary and the label y is a Massart corruption of f(x), for an unknown halfspace f : RN { 1}, with flipping probability η(x) η < 1/2. The goal of the learner is to compute a hypothesis with small 0-1 error. Our main result is the first computational hardness result for this learning problem. Specifically, assuming the (widely believed) subexponential-time hardness of the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem, we show that no polynomialtime Massart halfspace learner can achieve error better than Ω(η), even if the optimal 0-1 error is small, namely OPT = 2 logc(N) for any universal constant c (0, 1). |
| Researcher Affiliation | Collaboration | Ilias Diakonikolas UW Madison ilias@cs.wisc.edu Daniel M. Kane UC San-Diego dakane@ucsd.edu Pasin Manurangsi Google Research pasin@google.com Lisheng Ren UW Madison lren29@wisc.edu |
| Pseudocode | Yes | Algorithm 1 Rejection Sampling Algorithm Algorithm 2 Reducing LWE to Learning PTFs with Massart Noise |
| Open Source Code | No | The paper does not provide any links to open-source code or explicit statements about code availability for the described methodology. The checklist item 3a is marked N/A. |
| Open Datasets | No | This is a theoretical paper focusing on computational hardness proofs and theoretical models (PAC learning, LWE), not empirical studies involving datasets or training. No real-world datasets are used or referenced for training. |
| Dataset Splits | No | This is a theoretical paper. It does not conduct experiments on datasets that would require training, validation, or test splits. |
| Hardware Specification | No | This is a theoretical paper. No experiments requiring specific hardware were conducted or described. The checklist item 3d is marked N/A. |
| Software Dependencies | No | This is a theoretical paper. No software implementation details with version numbers are provided or necessary for the theoretical results. The checklist item 3b is marked N/A. |
| Experiment Setup | No | This is a theoretical paper. No empirical experiments or their setup details, such as hyperparameters or training configurations, are provided. The checklist item 3b is marked N/A. |