Related papers: Rigorous Implications of the Low-Degree Heuristic
We prove the hardness of weakly learning halfspaces in the presence of adversarial noise using polynomial threshold functions (PTFs). In particular, we prove that for any constants $d \in \mathbb{Z}^+$ and $\varepsilon > 0$, it is NP-hard…
Consider the problem of testing whether the outputs of a large language model (LLM) system change under an arbitrary intervention, such as an input perturbation or changing the model variant. We cannot simply compare two LLM outputs since…
The problem of clustering noisy and incompletely observed high-dimensional data points into a union of low-dimensional subspaces and a set of outliers is considered. The number of subspaces, their dimensions, and their orientations are…
In this paper, we investigate the principle that `good explanations are hard to vary' in the context of deep learning. We show that averaging gradients across examples -- akin to a logical OR of patterns -- can favor memorization and…
Large Language Models usually put more emphasis on accuracy and therefore, will guess even when not certain about the prediction, which is especially severe when fine-tuned on small datasets due to the inherent tendency toward…
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…
A distributed adaptive algorithm for estimation of sparse unknown parameters in the presence of nonGaussian noise is proposed in this paper based on normalized least mean fourth (NLMF) criterion. At the first step, local adaptive NLMF…
We describe a slightly sub-exponential time algorithm for learning parity functions in the presence of random classification noise. This results in a polynomial-time algorithm for the case of parity functions that depend on only the first…
Off-policy problems such as policy staleness and training--inference mismatch have become a major bottleneck for training stability and further exploration in LLM RL. The distribution gap between the inference and updated policies grows…
Fairness-aware learning is a novel framework for classification tasks. Like regular empirical risk minimization (ERM), it aims to learn a classifier with a low error rate, and at the same time, for the predictions of the classifier to be…
Variable selection in linear models plays a pivotal role in modern statistics. Hard-thresholding methods such as $l_0$ regularization are theoretically ideal but computationally infeasible. In this paper, we propose a new approach, called…
Learning deep neural network (DNN) classifier with noisy labels is a challenging task because the DNN can easily over-fit on these noisy labels due to its high capability. In this paper, we present a very simple but effective training…
In the context of statistical supervised learning, the noiseless linear model assumes that there exists a deterministic linear relation $Y = \langle \theta_*, X \rangle$ between the random output $Y$ and the random feature vector $\Phi(U)$,…
We discuss stability for a class of learning algorithms with respect to noisy labels. The algorithms we consider are for regression, and they involve the minimization of regularized risk functionals, such as L(f) := 1/N sum_i…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can elicit strong reasoning in large language models (LLMs), while their performance after RLVR varies dramatically across different base models. This raises a fundamental question: what…
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a widely adopted parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) technique for foundation models. Recent work has highlighted an inherent asymmetry in the initialization of LoRA's low-rank factors, which has…
Partial diffusion-based recursive least squares (PDRLS) is an effective method for reducing computational load and power consumption in adaptive network implementation. In this method, each node shares a part of its intermediate estimate…
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…
Discrete time analogues of ergodic stochastic differential equations (SDEs) are one of the most popular and flexible tools for sampling high-dimensional probability measures. Non-asymptotic analysis in the $L^2$ Wasserstein distance of…
Score matching enables the estimation of the gradient of a data distribution, a key component in denoising diffusion models used to recover clean data from corrupted inputs. In prior work, a heuristic weighting function has been used for…