Related papers: Hardness Results for Agnostically Learning Low-Deg…

Consider a system of $m$ polynomial equations $\{p_i(x) = b_i\}_{i \leq m}$ of degree $D\geq 2$ in $n$-dimensional variable $x \in \mathbb{R}^n$ such that each coefficient of every $p_i$ and $b_i$s are chosen at random and independently…

Gradient-based algorithms have shown great promise in solving large (two-player) zero-sum games. However, their success has been mostly confined to the low-precision regime since the number of iterations grows polynomially in $1/\epsilon$,…

This paper studies simple bilevel problems, where a convex upper-level function is minimized over the optimal solutions of a convex lower-level problem. We first show the fundamental difficulty of simple bilevel problems, that the…

In this paper, we study polynomial norms, i.e. norms that are the $d^{\text{th}}$ root of a degree-$d$ homogeneous polynomial $f$. We first show that a necessary and sufficient condition for $f^{1/d}$ to be a norm is for $f$ to be strictly…

We consider the following basic problem: given an $n$-variate degree-$d$ homogeneous polynomial $f$ with real coefficients, compute a unit vector $x \in \mathbb{R}^n$ that maximizes $|f(x)|$. Besides its fundamental nature, this problem…

We give the first polynomial-time algorithm for the testable learning of halfspaces in the presence of adversarial label noise under the Gaussian distribution. In the recently introduced testable learning model, one is required to produce a…

We study the \emph{order-finding problem} for Read-once Oblivious Algebraic Branching Programs (ROABPs). Given a polynomial $f$ and a parameter $w$, the goal is to find an order $\sigma$ in which $f$ has an ROABP of \emph{width} $w$. We…

We study the existence of approximate pure Nash equilibria ($\alpha$-PNE) in weighted atomic congestion games with polynomial cost functions of maximum degree $d$. Previously it was known that $d$-approximate equilibria always exist, while…

We give simple deterministic reductions demonstrating the NP-hardness of approximating the nearest codeword problem and minimum distance problem within arbitrary constant factors (and almost-polynomial factors assuming NP cannot be solved…

We study the computational power of polynomial threshold functions, that is, threshold functions of real polynomials over the boolean cube. We provide two new results bounding the computational power of this model. Our first result shows…

Real-world sequential decision making problems commonly involve partial observability, which requires the agent to maintain a memory of history in order to infer the latent states, plan and make good decisions. Coping with partial…

We prove that, assuming the exponential time hypothesis, finding an \epsilon-approximately optimal symmetric signaling scheme in a two-player zero-sum game requires quasi-polynomial time. This is tight by [Cheng et al., FOCS'15] and…

This paper describes one objective function for learning semantically coherent feature embeddings in multi-output classification problems, i.e., when the response variables have dimension higher than one. In particular, we consider the…

In the $\varepsilon$-Consensus-Halving problem, a fundamental problem in fair division, there are $n$ agents with valuations over the interval $[0,1]$, and the goal is to divide the interval into pieces and assign a label "$+$" or "$-$" to…

$\newcommand{\eps}{\varepsilon} $We prove that for any $\eps > 0$ it is $\textsf{NP}$-hard to approximate the non-commutative Grothendieck problem to within a factor $1/2 + \eps$, which matches the approximation ratio of the algorithm of…

The (weak) Nullstellensatz over finite fields says that if $P_1,\ldots,P_m$ are $n$-variate degree-$d$ polynomials with no common zero over a finite field $\mathbb{F}$ then there are polynomials $R_1,\ldots,R_m$ such that…

We study the complexity of smoothed agnostic learning, recently introduced by~\cite{CKKMS24}, in which the learner competes with the best classifier in a target class under slight Gaussian perturbations of the inputs. Specifically, we focus…

Correlated equilibria are a fundamental solution concept in game theory. However, despite decades of research, the complexity beyond games of polynomial type -- such as extensive-form games, congestion or routing games, and more broadly…

The $\epsilon$-approximate degree $deg_\epsilon(f)$ of a Boolean function $f$ is the least degree of a real-valued polynomial that approximates $f$ pointwise to error $\epsilon$. The approximate degree of $f$ is at least $k$ iff there…

The approximate degree of a Boolean function f is the least degree of a real polynomial that approximates f pointwise to error at most 1/3. Approximate degree is known to be a lower bound on quantum query complexity. We resolve or nearly…