Learning Halfspaces with Massart Noise Under Structured Distributions

Abstract

We study the problem of learning halfspaces with Massart noise in the distribution-specific PAC model. We give the first computationally efficient algorithm for this problem with respect to a broad family of distributions, including log-concave distributions. This resolves an open question posed in a number of prior works. Our approach is extremely simple: We identify a smooth non-convex surrogate loss with the property that any approximate stationary point of this loss defines a halfspace that is close to the target halfspace. Given this structural result, we can use SGD to solve the underlying learning problem.

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