Adversarial Manifold Estimation

This paper studies the statistical query (SQ) complexity of estimating $d$-dimensional submanifolds in $\mathbb{R}^n$. We propose a purely geometric algorithm called Manifold Propagation, that reduces the problem to three natural geometric routines: projection, tangent space estimation, and point detection. We then provide constructions of these geometric routines in the SQ framework. Given an adversarial $\mathrm{STAT}(\tau)$ oracle and a target Hausdorff distance precision $\varepsilon = \Omega(\tau^{2 / (d + 1)})$, the resulting SQ manifold reconstruction algorithm has query complexity $O(n \operatorname{polylog}(n) \varepsilon^{-d / 2})$, which is proved to be nearly optimal. In the process, we establish low-rank matrix completion results for SQ's and lower bounds for randomized SQ estimators in general metric spaces.