Related papers: The Quasi-Polynomial Low-Degree Conjecture is Fals…
Over the past decade, the low-degree heuristic has been used to estimate the algorithmic thresholds for a wide range of average-case planted vs null distinguishing problems. Such results rely on the hypothesis that if the low-degree moments…
A conjecture of Hopkins (2018) posits that for certain high-dimensional hypothesis testing problems, no polynomial-time algorithm can outperform so-called "simple statistics", which are low-degree polynomials in the data. This conjecture…
The low-degree polynomial framework has been highly successful in predicting computational versus statistical gaps for high-dimensional problems in average-case analysis and machine learning. This success has led to the low-degree…
In a distinguishing problem, the input is a sample drawn from one of two distributions and the algorithm is tasked with identifying the source distribution. The performance of a distinguishing algorithm is measured by its advantage, i.e.,…
One fundamental goal of high-dimensional statistics is to detect or recover planted structure (such as a low-rank matrix) hidden in noisy data. A growing body of work studies low-degree polynomials as a restricted model of computation for…
A central question in high-dimensional statistics is to understand statistical--computational gaps: regimes in which recovering a hidden signal is information-theoretically possible but conjectured to be computationally intractable. The…
We study when low coordinate degree functions (LCDF) -- linear combinations of functions depending on small subsets of entries of a vector -- can hypothesis test between high-dimensional probability measures. These functions are a…
We consider the following basic, and very broad, statistical problem: Given a known high-dimensional distribution ${\cal D}$ over $\mathbb{R}^n$ and a collection of data points in $\mathbb{R}^n$, distinguish between the two possibilities…
Low-degree polynomials have emerged as a powerful paradigm for providing evidence of statistical-computational gaps across a variety of high-dimensional statistical models [Wein25]. For detection problems -- where the goal is to test a…
High-dimensional planted problems, such as finding a hidden dense subgraph within a random graph, often exhibit a gap between statistical and computational feasibility. While recovering the hidden structure may be statistically possible, it…
We study the low-degree hardness of broadcasting on trees. Broadcasting on trees has been extensively studied in statistical physics, in computational biology in relation to phylogenetic reconstruction and in statistics and computer science…
Analysis of low-degree polynomial algorithms is a powerful, newly-popular method for predicting computational thresholds in hypothesis testing problems. One limitation of current techniques for this analysis is their restriction to…
These notes survey and explore an emerging method, which we call the low-degree method, for predicting and understanding statistical-versus-computational tradeoffs in high-dimensional inference problems. In short, the method posits that a…
We consider the problem of detecting a planted clique of size $k$ in a random graph on $n$ vertices. When the size of the clique exceeds $\Theta(\sqrt{n})$, polynomial-time algorithms for detection proliferate. We study faster -- namely,…
We consider the task of detecting a hidden bipartite subgraph in a given random graph. This is formulated as a hypothesis testing problem, under the null hypothesis, the graph is a realization of an Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi random graph over $n$…
We study the computational limits of the following general hypothesis testing problem. Let H=H_n be an \emph{arbitrary} undirected graph on n vertices. We study the detection task between a ``null'' Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi random graph G(n,p)…
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 study distribution-free property testing and learning problems where the unknown probability distribution is a product distribution over $\mathbb{R}^d$. For many important classes of functions, such as intersections of halfspaces,…
The planted random subgraph detection conjecture of Abram et al. (TCC 2023) asserts the pseudorandomness of a pair of graphs $(H, G)$, where $G$ is an Erdos-Renyi random graph on $n$ vertices, and $H$ is a random induced subgraph of $G$ on…
Stochastic smooth nonconvex minimax problems are prevalent in machine learning, e.g., GAN training, fair classification, and distributionally robust learning. Stochastic gradient descent ascent (GDA)-type methods are popular in practice due…