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A Near-optimal SQ Lower Bound for Smoothed Agnostic Learning of Boolean Halfspaces

Machine Learning 2026-05-14 v2

Abstract

We study the complexity of smoothed agnostic learning of halfspaces on {±1}n\{\pm 1\}^n under uniform marginals in the model of~\cite{KM25}, where each input coordinate is independently flipped with probability σ(0,1/2)\sigma \in (0, {1}/{2}). We show that L1L^1 polynomial regression achieves runtime and sample complexity O~(nO(log(1/ε)/σ))\tilde{O}(n^{O(\log(1/\varepsilon)/\sigma)}), and prove a nearly matching Statistical Query complexity lower bound of nΩ(log(1+σ/ε2)/σ)n^{\Omega(\log(1+\sigma/\varepsilon^2)/\sigma)}. This complements the recent work of~\cite{DK26}, which established analogous bounds in the continuous setting under Gaussian marginals.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.02350,
  title  = {A Near-optimal SQ Lower Bound for Smoothed Agnostic Learning of Boolean Halfspaces},
  author = {Tim Sinen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.02350},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Fixed several typos and minor proof issues