A Fully Polynomial-Time Algorithm for Robustly Learning Halfspaces over the Hypercube

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chandrasekaran, Gautam, Klivans, Adam R., Stavropoulos, Konstantinos, Vasilyan, Arsen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chandrasekaran, Gautam
Klivans, Adam R.
Stavropoulos, Konstantinos
Vasilyan, Arsen
author_facet Chandrasekaran, Gautam
Klivans, Adam R.
Stavropoulos, Konstantinos
Vasilyan, Arsen
contents We give the first fully polynomial-time algorithm for learning halfspaces with respect to the uniform distribution on the hypercube in the presence of contamination, where an adversary may corrupt some fraction of examples and labels arbitrarily. We achieve an error guarantee of $η^{O(1)}+ε$ where $η$ is the noise rate. Such a result was not known even in the agnostic setting, where only labels can be adversarially corrupted. All prior work over the last two decades has a superpolynomial dependence in $1/ε$ or succeeds only with respect to continuous marginals (such as log-concave densities). Previous analyses rely heavily on various structural properties of continuous distributions such as anti-concentration. Our approach avoids these requirements and makes use of a new algorithm for learning Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) with only a polylogarithmic dependence on the activation function's Lipschitz constant. More generally, our framework shows that supervised learning with respect to discrete distributions is not as difficult as previously thought.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07244
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Fully Polynomial-Time Algorithm for Robustly Learning Halfspaces over the Hypercube
Chandrasekaran, Gautam
Klivans, Adam R.
Stavropoulos, Konstantinos
Vasilyan, Arsen
Data Structures and Algorithms
Machine Learning
We give the first fully polynomial-time algorithm for learning halfspaces with respect to the uniform distribution on the hypercube in the presence of contamination, where an adversary may corrupt some fraction of examples and labels arbitrarily. We achieve an error guarantee of $η^{O(1)}+ε$ where $η$ is the noise rate. Such a result was not known even in the agnostic setting, where only labels can be adversarially corrupted. All prior work over the last two decades has a superpolynomial dependence in $1/ε$ or succeeds only with respect to continuous marginals (such as log-concave densities). Previous analyses rely heavily on various structural properties of continuous distributions such as anti-concentration. Our approach avoids these requirements and makes use of a new algorithm for learning Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) with only a polylogarithmic dependence on the activation function's Lipschitz constant. More generally, our framework shows that supervised learning with respect to discrete distributions is not as difficult as previously thought.
title A Fully Polynomial-Time Algorithm for Robustly Learning Halfspaces over the Hypercube
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07244