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Spotlight Poster

Learning Noisy Halfspaces with a Margin: Massart is No Harder than Random

Gautam Chandrasekaran · Vasilis Kontonis · Konstantinos Stavropoulos · Kevin Tian

Poster Room - TBD
[ ]
Fri 13 Dec 11 a.m. PST — 2 p.m. PST

Abstract: We study the problem of PAC learning $\gamma$-margin halfspaces with Massart noise. We propose a simple proper learning algorithm, the Perspectron, that has sample complexity $\widetilde{O}((\epsilon\gamma)^{-2})$ and achieves classification error at most $\eta+\epsilon$ where $\eta$ is the Massart noise rate. Prior works (DGT19, CKMY20) came with worse sample complexity guarantees (in both $\epsilon$ and $\gamma$) or could only handle random classification noise (DDKWZ23,KITBMV23)--- a much milder noise assumption. We also show that our results extend to the more challenging setting of learning generalized linear models with a known link function under Massart noise, achieving a similar sample complexity to the halfspace case. This significantly improves upon the prior state-of-the-art in this setting due to CKMY20, who introduced this model.

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