Related papers: SQ Lower Bounds for Non-Gaussian Component Analysi…
We prove that for every odd $q\geq 3$, any $q$-query binary, possibly non-linear locally decodable code ($q$-LDC) $E:\{\pm1\}^k \rightarrow \{\pm1\}^n$ must satisfy $k \leq \tilde{O}(n^{1-2/q})$. For even $q$, this bound was established in…
In the past decade, sparse principal component analysis has emerged as an archetypal problem for illustrating statistical-computational tradeoffs. This trend has largely been driven by a line of research aiming to characterize the…
We prove a query complexity lower bound for $\mathsf{QMA}$ protocols that solve approximate counting: estimating the size of a set given a membership oracle. This gives rise to an oracle $A$ such that $\mathsf{SBP}^A \not\subset…
In distributed stochastic optimization, where parallel and asynchronous methods are employed, we establish optimal time complexities under virtually any computation behavior of workers/devices/CPUs/GPUs, capturing potential disconnections…
Log-concave sampling has witnessed remarkable algorithmic advances in recent years, but the corresponding problem of proving lower bounds for this task has remained elusive, with lower bounds previously known only in dimension one. In this…
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…
We study the problem of agnostic learning under the Gaussian distribution. We develop a method for finding hard families of examples for a wide class of problems by using LP duality. For Boolean-valued concept classes, we show that the…
We study stochastic nonconvex optimization under heavy-tailed noise. In this setting, the stochastic gradients only have bounded $p$-th central moment ($p$-BCM) for some $p \in (1,2]$. Building on the foundational work of Arjevani et al.…
The standard quadratic optimization problem (StQP), i.e. the problem of minimizing a quadratic form $\bold x^TQ\bold x$ on the standard simplex $\{\bold x\ge\bold 0: \bold x^T\bold e=1\}$, is studied. The StQP arises in numerous…
We give a simplified and improved lower bound for the simplex range reporting problem. We show that given a set $P$ of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, any data structure that uses $S(n)$ space to answer such queries must have…
We study the density estimation problem defined as follows: given $k$ distributions $p_1, \ldots, p_k$ over a discrete domain $[n]$, as well as a collection of samples chosen from a ``query'' distribution $q$ over $[n]$, output $p_i$ that…
This paper develops several average-case reduction techniques to show new hardness results for three central high-dimensional statistics problems, implying a statistical-computational gap induced by robustness, a detection-recovery gap and…
We introduce a framework for proving lower bounds on computational problems over distributions against algorithms that can be implemented using access to a statistical query oracle. For such algorithms, access to the input distribution is…
Stochastic convex optimization, where the objective is the expectation of a random convex function, is an important and widely used method with numerous applications in machine learning, statistics, operations research and other areas. We…
Quantum Annealing (QA) is a computational framework where a quantum system's continuous evolution is used to find the global minimum of an objective function over an unstructured search space. It can be seen as a general metaheuristic for…
In unitary property testing a quantum algorithm, also known as a tester, is given query access to a black-box unitary and has to decide whether it satisfies some property. We propose a new technique for proving lower bounds on the quantum…
This paper extends the standard chaining technique to prove excess risk upper bounds for empirical risk minimization with random design settings even if the magnitude of the noise and the estimates is unbounded. The bound applies to many…
We study the complexity of learning $k$-mixtures of Gaussians ($k$-GMMs) on $\mathbb{R}^d$. This task is known to have complexity $d^{\Omega(k)}$ in full generality. To circumvent this exponential lower bound on the number of components,…
Traditional statistical analysis requires that the analysis process and data are independent. By contrast, the new field of adaptive data analysis hopes to understand and provide algorithms and accuracy guarantees for research as it is…
The goal in thinning is to summarize a dataset using a small set of representative points. Remarkably, sub-Gaussian thinning algorithms like Kernel Halving and Compress can match the quality of uniform subsampling while substantially…