We consider the problem of finding a monomial (or a term) that maximizes the agreement rate with a given set of examples over the Boolean hypercube. The problem originates in learning and is referred to as {\em agnostic learning} of monomials. Finding a monomial with the highest agreement rate was ... more >>>

We study the properties of the agnostic learning framework of Haussler (1992)and Kearns, Schapire and Sellie (1992). In particular, we address the question: is there any situation in which membership queries are useful in agnostic learning?

Our results show that the answer is negative for distribution-independent agnostic learning and positive ... more >>>

Statistical query (SQ) learning model of Kearns (1993) is a natural restriction of the PAC learning model in which a learning algorithm is allowed to obtain estimates of statistical properties of the examples but cannot see the examples themselves. We describe a new and simple characterization of the query complexity ... more >>>

In 1994, Y. Mansour conjectured that for every DNF formula on $n$ variables with $t$ terms there exists a polynomial $p$ with $t^{O(\log (1/\epsilon))}$ non-zero coefficients such that $\E_{x \in \{0,1\}}[(p(x)-f(x))^2] \leq \epsilon$. We make the first progress on this conjecture and show that it is true for several natural ... more >>>

We show that all non-negative submodular functions have high noise-stability. As a consequence, we obtain a polynomial-time learning algorithm for this class with respect to any product distribution on $\{-1,1\}^n$ (for any constant accuracy parameter $\epsilon$ ). Our algorithm also succeeds in the agnostic setting. Previous work on learning submodular ... more >>>

Polynomial approximations to boolean functions have led to many positive results in computer science. In particular, polynomial approximations to the sign function underly algorithms for agnostically learning halfspaces, as well as pseudorandom generators for halfspaces. In this work, we investigate the limits of these techniques by proving inapproximability results for ... more >>>

We give new quantum algorithms for evaluating composed functions whose inputs may be shared between bottom-level gates. Let $f$ be a Boolean function and consider a function $F$ obtained by applying $f$ to conjunctions of possibly overlapping subsets of $n$ variables. If $f$ has quantum query complexity $Q(f)$, we give ... more >>>

This paper aims to derandomize the following problems in the smoothed analysis of Spielman and Teng. Learn Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF), invert Fourier Transforms (FT), and verify small circuits' unsatisfiability. Learning algorithms must predict a future observation from the only $m$ i.i.d. samples of a fixed but unknown joint-distribution $P(G(x),y)$ ... more >>>