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arXiv · 2006.06742

Non-Convex SGD Learns Halfspaces with Adversarial Label Noise

Ilias Diakonikolas·Vasilis Kontonis·Christos Tzamos·Nikos Zarifis
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Abstract

We study the problem of agnostically learning homogeneous halfspaces in the distribution-specific PAC model. For a broad family of structured distributions, including log-concave distributions, we show that non-convex SGD efficiently converges to a solution with misclassification error $O(\opt)+\eps$, where $\opt$ is the misclassification error of the best-fitting halfspace. In sharp contrast, we show that optimizing any convex surrogate inherently leads to misclassification error of $\omega(\opt)$, even under Gaussian marginals.

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Ilias Diakonikolas, Vasilis Kontonis, Christos Tzamos, Nikos Zarifis. 2020-06-11. Non-Convex SGD Learns Halfspaces with Adversarial Label Noise. https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.06742

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