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We study the efficient learnability of high-dimensional Gaussian mixtures in the outlier-robust setting, where a small constant fraction of the data is adversarially corrupted. We resolve the polynomial learnability of this problem when the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-05-14 Ilias Diakonikolas , Samuel B. Hopkins , Daniel Kane , Sushrut Karmalkar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Adam R. Klivans , Konstantinos Stavropoulos , Kevin Tian , Arsen Vasilyan

Even in low dimensions, sampling from multi-modal distributions is challenging. We provide the first sampling algorithm for a broad class of distributions -- including all Gaussian mixtures -- with a query complexity that is polynomial in…

Computation · Statistics 2025-10-24 Adrien Vacher , Omar Chehab , Anna Korba

We resolve one of the major outstanding problems in robust statistics. In particular, if $X$ is an evenly weighted mixture of two arbitrary $d$-dimensional Gaussians, we devise a polynomial time algorithm that given access to samples from…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Daniel M. Kane

We study the problem of computationally efficient proper agnostic learning of multidimensional concept classes under the Gaussian distribution. In this setting, given i.i.d. labeled samples from an unknown distribution over $\mathbb{R}^d…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Sergei Tikhonov , Arsen Vasilyan

We give a new algorithm for learning mixtures of $k$ Gaussians (with identity covariance in $\mathbb{R}^n$) to TV error $\varepsilon$, with quasi-polynomial ($O(n^{\text{poly\,log}\left(\frac{n+k}{\varepsilon}\right)})$) time and sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Khashayar Gatmiry , Jonathan Kelner , Holden Lee

We revisit the fundamental problem of learning with distribution shift, in which a learner is given labeled samples from training distribution $D$, unlabeled samples from test distribution $D'$ and is asked to output a classifier with low…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Adam R. Klivans , Konstantinos Stavropoulos , Arsen Vasilyan

Many popular learning algorithms (E.g. Regression, Fourier-Transform based algorithms, Kernel SVM and Kernel ridge regression) operate by reducing the problem to a convex optimization problem over a vector space of functions. These methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-05-13 Amit Daniely , Nati Linial , Shai Shalev-Shwartz

We study learning under a two-step contrastive example oracle, as introduced by Mansouri et. al. (2025), where each queried (or sampled) labeled example is paired with an additional contrastive example of opposite label. While Mansouri et…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Aryan Alavi Razavi Ravari , Farnam Mansouri , Yuxin Chen , Valentio Iverson , Adish Singla , Sandra Zilles

We study the efficient learnability of geometric concept classes - specifically, low-degree polynomial threshold functions (PTFs) and intersections of halfspaces - when a fraction of the data is adversarially corrupted. We give the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-06 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Alistair Stewart

In traditional models of supervised learning, the goal of a learner -- given examples from an arbitrary joint distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d \times \{\pm 1\}$ -- is to output a hypothesis that is competitive (to within $\epsilon$) of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Gautam Chandrasekaran , Adam Klivans , Vasilis Kontonis , Raghu Meka , Konstantinos Stavropoulos

We study the estimation of distributional parameters when samples are shown only if they fall in some unknown set $S \subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$. Kontonis, Tzamos, and Zampetakis (FOCS'19) gave a $d^{\mathrm{poly}(1/\varepsilon)}$ time…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Jane H. Lee , Anay Mehrotra , Manolis Zampetakis

Given data drawn from a mixture of multivariate Gaussians, a basic problem is to accurately estimate the mixture parameters. We give an algorithm for this problem that has a running time, and data requirement polynomial in the dimension and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2010-04-27 Ankur Moitra , Gregory Valiant

The question of polynomial learnability of probability distributions, particularly Gaussian mixture distributions, has recently received significant attention in theoretical computer science and machine learning. However, despite major…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2010-05-13 Mikhail Belkin , Kaushik Sinha

A Forster transform is an operation that turns a distribution into one with good anti-concentration properties. While a Forster transform does not always exist, we show that any distribution can be efficiently decomposed as a disjoint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Christos Tzamos

There are many high dimensional function classes that have fast agnostic learning algorithms when assumptions on the distribution of examples can be made, such as Gaussianity or uniformity over the domain. But how can one be confident that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Ronitt Rubinfeld , Arsen Vasilyan

The Forster transform is a method of regularizing a dataset by placing it in {\em radial isotropic position} while maintaining some of its essential properties. Forster transforms have played a key role in a diverse range of settings…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Ilias Diakonikolas , Christos Tzamos , Daniel M. Kane

In this work, we give a ${\rm poly}(d,k)$ time and sample algorithm for efficiently learning the parameters of a mixture of $k$ spherical distributions in $d$ dimensions. Unlike all previous methods, our techniques apply to heavy-tailed…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Alkis Kalavasis , Pravesh K. Kothari , Shuchen Li , Manolis Zampetakis

We show strong (and surprisingly simple) lower bounds for weakly learning intersections of halfspaces in the improper setting. Strikingly little is known about this problem. For instance, it is not even known if there is a polynomial-time…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Stefan Tiegel

We design efficient distance approximation algorithms for several classes of structured high-dimensional distributions. Specifically, we show algorithms for the following problems: - Given sample access to two Bayesian networks $P_1$ and…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Arnab Bhattacharyya , Sutanu Gayen , Kuldeep S. Meel , N. V. Vinodchandran