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arXiv · 2605.02350

A Near-optimal SQ Lower Bound for Smoothed Agnostic Learning of Boolean Halfspaces

Tim Sinen
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Abstract

We study the complexity of smoothed agnostic learning of halfspaces on $\{\pm 1\}^n$ under uniform marginals in the model of~\cite{KM25}, where each input coordinate is independently flipped with probability $\sigma \in (0, {1}/{2})$. We show that $L^1$ polynomial regression achieves runtime and sample complexity $\tilde{O}(n^{O(\log(1/\varepsilon)/\sigma)})$, and prove a nearly matching Statistical Query complexity lower bound of $n^{\Omega(\log(1+\sigma/\varepsilon^2)/\sigma)}$. This complements the recent work of~\cite{DK26}, which established analogous bounds in the continuous setting under Gaussian marginals.

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Tim Sinen. 2026-05-04. A Near-optimal SQ Lower Bound for Smoothed Agnostic Learning of Boolean Halfspaces. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02350

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