Related papers: Hardness Results for Agnostically Learning Low-Deg…
We consider the problems of \emph{learning} and \emph{testing} real-valued convex functions over Gaussian space. Despite the extensive study of function convexity across mathematics, statistics, and computer science, its learnability and…
As algorithmic decision-making systems are becoming more pervasive, it is crucial to ensure such systems do not become mechanisms of unfair discrimination on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc. Moreover, due to the inherent…
Learning parity functions is a canonical problem in learning theory, which although computationally tractable, is not amenable to standard learning algorithms such as gradient-based methods. This hardness is usually explained via…
Since its introduction by Valiant in 1984, PAC learning of DNF expressions remains one of the central problems in learning theory. We consider this problem in the setting where the underlying distribution is uniform, or more generally, a…
We give the first non-trivial upper bounds on the average sensitivity and noise sensitivity of polynomial threshold functions. More specifically, for a Boolean function f on n variables equal to the sign of a real, multivariate polynomial…
The complexity of learning a concept class under Gaussian marginals in the difficult agnostic model is closely related to its $L_1$-approximability by low-degree polynomials. For any concept class with Gaussian surface area at most…
We study a combinatorial problem called Minimum Maximal Matching, where we are asked to find in a general graph the smallest that can not be extended. We show that this problem is hard to approximate with a constant smaller than 2, assuming…
The approximate degree of a Boolean function $f\colon\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}$ is the minimum degree of a real polynomial $p$ that approximates $f$ pointwise: $|f(x)-p(x)|\leq1/3$ for all $x\in\{0,1\}^n.$ For every $\delta>0,$ we construct CNF…
The approximate degree of a Boolean function $f: \{-1, 1\}^n \to \{-1, 1\}$ is the minimum degree of a real polynomial that approximates $f$ to within error $1/3$ in the $\ell_\infty$ norm. In an influential result, Aaronson and Shi (J. ACM…
We develop value iteration-based algorithms to solve in a unified manner different classes of combinatorial zero-sum games with mean-payoff type rewards. These algorithms rely on an oracle, evaluating the dynamic programming operator up to…
The results of Raghavendra (2008) show that assuming Khot's Unique Games Conjecture (2002), for every constraint satisfaction problem there exists a generic semi-definite program that achieves the optimal approximation factor. This result…
We give a new algorithm for Unique Games which is based on purely {\em spectral} techniques, in contrast to previous work in the area, which relies heavily on semidefinite programming (SDP). Given a highly satisfiable instance of Unique…
Inspired by recent work on learning with distribution shift, we give a general outlier removal algorithm called iterative polynomial filtering and show a number of striking applications for supervised learning with contamination: (1) We…
A low-degree test is a collection of simple, local rules for checking the proximity of an arbitrary function to a low-degree polynomial. Each rule depends on the function's values at a small number of places. If a function satisfies many…
The seminal work of Dwork {\em et al.} [ITCS 2012] introduced a metric-based notion of individual fairness. Given a task-specific similarity metric, their notion required that every pair of similar individuals should be treated similarly.…
We study the problem of testing whether a function $f: \mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}$ is a polynomial of degree at most $d$ in the \emph{distribution-free} testing model. Here, the distance between functions is measured with respect to an…
In the number partitioning problem (NPP) one aims to partition a given set of $N$ real numbers into two subsets with approximately equal sum. The NPP is a well-studied optimization problem and is famous for possessing a…
We prove a new structural lemma for partial Boolean functions $f$, which we call the seed lemma for DNF. Using the lemma, we give the first subexponential algorithm for proper learning of DNF in Angluin's Equivalence Query (EQ) model. The…
We consider online no-regret learning in unknown games with bandit feedback, where each player can only observe its reward at each time -- determined by all players' current joint action -- rather than its gradient. We focus on the class of…
The $\epsilon$-approximate degree of a Boolean function $f: \{-1, 1\}^n \to \{-1, 1\}$ is the minimum degree of a real polynomial that approximates $f$ to within $\epsilon$ in the $\ell_\infty$ norm. We prove several lower bounds on this…