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1. Continuous LWE

   Bruna, J; Regev, O; Song, M; Tang, Y (June 2021, Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing)

   null (Ed.)

   We introduce a continuous analogue of the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem, which we name CLWE. We give a polynomial-time quantum reduction from worst-case lattice problems to CLWE, showing that CLWE enjoys similar hardness guarantees to those of LWE. Alternatively, our result can also be seen as opening new avenues of (quantum) attacks on lattice problems. Our work resolves an open problem regarding the computational complexity of learning mixtures of Gaussians without separability assumptions (Diakonikolas 2016, Moitra 2018). As an additional motivation, (a slight variant of) CLWE was considered in the context of robust machine learning (Diakonikolas et al. FOCS 2017), where hardness in the statistical query (SQ) model was shown; our work addresses the open question regarding its computational hardness (Bubeck et al. ICML 2019). 

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2. Learning Neural Networks with Two Nonlinear Layers in Polynomial Time

   Goel, Surbhi; Klivans, Adam (June 2019, Conference on Learning Theory)

   We give a polynomial-time algorithm for learning neural networks with one layer of sigmoids feeding into any Lipschitz, monotone activation function (e.g., sigmoid or ReLU). We make no assumptions on the structure of the network, and the algorithm succeeds with respect to {\em any} distribution on the unit ball in n dimensions (hidden weight vectors also have unit norm). This is the first assumption-free, provably efficient algorithm for learning neural networks with two nonlinear layers. Our algorithm-- Alphatron-- is a simple, iterative update rule that combines isotonic regression with kernel methods. It outputs a hypothesis that yields efficient oracle access to interpretable features. It also suggests a new approach to Boolean learning problems via real-valued conditional-mean functions, sidestepping traditional hardness results from computational learning theory. Along these lines, we subsume and improve many longstanding results for PAC learning Boolean functions to the more general, real-valued setting of {\em probabilistic concepts}, a model that (unlike PAC learning) requires non-i.i.d. noise-tolerance. 

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3. Distributed block-diagonal approximation methods for regularized empirical risk minimization

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10994-019-05859-2  

   Lee, Ching-pei; Chang, Kai-Wei (January 2019, Machine Learning)

   In recent years, there is a growing need to train machine learning models on a huge volume of data. Therefore, designing efficient distributed optimization algorithms for empirical risk minimization (ERM) has become an active and challenging research topic. In this paper, we propose a flexible framework for distributed ERM training through solving the dual problem, which provides a unified description and comparison of existing methods. Our approach requires only approximate solutions of the sub-problems involved in the optimization process, and is versatile to be applied on many large-scale machine learning problems including classification, regression, and structured prediction. We show that our framework enjoys global linear convergence for a broad class of non-strongly-convex problems, and some specific choices of the sub-problems can even achieve much faster convergence than existing approaches by a refined analysis. This improved convergence rate is also reflected in the superior empirical performance of our method. 

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4. On the Cryptographic Hardness of Learning Single Periodic Neurons

   Min Jae Song; Ilias Zadik; Joan Bruna (December 2021, Advances in neural information processing systems)

   We show a simple reduction which demonstrates the cryptographic hardness of learning a single periodic neuron over isotropic Gaussian distributions in the pres- ence of noise. More precisely, our reduction shows that any polynomial-time algorithm (not necessarily gradient-based) for learning such functions under small noise implies a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for solving worst-case lattice problems, whose hardness form the foundation of lattice-based cryptography. Our core hard family of functions, which are well-approximated by one-layer neural networks, take the general form of a univariate periodic function applied to an affine projection of the data. These functions have appeared in previous seminal works which demonstrate their hardness against gradient-based (Shamir’18), and Statisti- cal Query (SQ) algorithms (Song et al.’17). We show that if (polynomially) small noise is added to the labels, the intractability of learning these functions applies to all polynomial-time algorithms, beyond gradient-based and SQ algorithms, under the aforementioned cryptographic assumptions. Moreover, we demonstrate the necessity of noise in the hardness result by designing a polynomial-time algorithm for learning certain families of such functions under exponentially small adversarial noise. Our proposed algorithm is not a gradient-based or an SQ algorithm, but is rather based on the celebrated Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovász (LLL) lattice basis reduction algorithm. Furthermore, in the absence of noise, this algorithm can be directly applied to solve CLWE detection (Bruna et al.’21) and phase retrieval with an optimal sample complexity of d + 1 samples. In the former case, this improves upon the quadratic-in-d sample complexity required in (Bruna et al.’21). 

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5. On the Cryptographic Hardness of Learning Single Periodic Neurons

   Song, Min Jae; Zadik, Ilias; Bruna, Joan (December 2021, Advances in neural information processing systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract We show a simple reduction which demonstrates the cryptographic hardness of learning a single periodic neuron over isotropic Gaussian distributions in the presence of noise. More precisely, our reduction shows that any polynomial-time algorithm (not necessarily gradientbased) for learning such functions under small noise implies a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for solving worst-case lattice problems, whose hardness form the foundation of lattice-based cryptography. Our core hard family of functions, which are well-approximated by one-layer neural networks, take the general form of a univariate periodic function applied to an affine projection of the data. These functions have appeared in previous seminal works which demonstrate their hardness against gradient-based (Shamir’18), and Statistical Query (SQ) algorithms (Song et al.’17). We show that if (polynomially) small noise is added to the labels, the intractability of learning these functions applies to all polynomial-time algorithms, beyond gradient-based and SQ algorithms, under the aforementioned cryptographic assumptions. Moreover, we demonstrate the necessity of noise in the hardness result by designing a polynomial-time algorithm for learning certain families of such functions under exponentially small adversarial noise. Our proposed algorithm is not a gradient-based or an SQ algorithm, but is rather based on the celebrated Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovász (LLL) lattice basis reduction algorithm. Furthermore, in the absence of noise, this algorithm can be directly applied to solve CLWE detection (Bruna et al.’21) and phase retrieval with an optimal sample complexity of d + 1 samples. In the former case, this improves upon the quadratic-in-d sample complexity required in (Bruna et al.’21). 

   more » « less