Hard instances, which require a long time for a specific algorithm to solve, help (1) analyze the algorithm for accelerating it and (2) build a good benchmark for evaluating the performance of algorithms. There exist several efforts for automatic generation of hard instances. For example, evolutionary algorithms have b…
arXiv research
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This work connects hardness of approximation and learning.
Reduces learning periodic neural networks to lattice problems, proving hardness under cryptographic assumptions.
An algorithmically hard phase was described in a range of inference problems: even if the signal can be reconstructed with a small error from an information theoretic point of view, known algorithms fail unless the noise-to-signal ratio is sufficiently small. This hard phase is typically understood as a metastable bran…
Paper develops algorithms to maximize AUC in imbalanced classification.
Optimal CL requires perfect memory and is NP-hard.
Quantum algorithm approximates Khovanov homology ranks.
Paper characterizes causal graphs from hard interventions and proposes a learning algorithm.
Many optimization problems can be cast into the maximum satisfiability (MAX-SAT) form, and many solvers have been developed for tackling such problems. To evaluate a MAX-SAT solver, it is convenient to generate hard MAX-SAT instances with known solutions. Here, we propose a method of generating weighted MAX-2-SAT insta…
Large-scale non-convex sparsity-constrained problems have recently gained extensive attention. Most existing deterministic optimization methods (e.g., GraSP) are not suitable for large-scale and high-dimensional problems, and thus stochastic optimization methods with hard thresholding (e.g., SVRGHT) become more attract…
Sparse linear regression is hard to solve efficiently, even with k-sparse solutions.
In this thesis I explore challenging discrete energy minimization problems that arise mainly in the context of computer vision tasks. This work motivates the use of such "hard-to-optimize" non-submodular functionals, and proposes methods and algorithms to cope with the NP-hardness of their optimization. Consequently, t…
The most common method for DNN pruning is hard thresholding of network weights, followed by retraining to recover any lost accuracy. Recently developed smart pruning algorithms use the DNN response over the training set for a variety of cost functions to determine redundant network weights, leading to less accuracy deg…
SLR tackles sparse linear regression problems, showing hardness for efficient algorithms.
New algorithms minimize regret with multiple best arms in large action spaces.
Single T-gate makes distribution learning hard for deep circuits.
Study limits of testing algorithms without assumptions, finding key performance bounds.
Coresets are efficient representations of data sets such that models trained on the coreset are provably competitive with models trained on the original data set. As such, they have been successfully used to scale up clustering models such as K-Means and Gaussian mixture models to massive data sets. However, until now,…
Study shows challenges in reinforcement learning math problems, proposing enhancements and a hardness measure.
The use of M-estimators in generalized linear regression models in high dimensional settings requires risk minimization with hard constraints. Of the known methods, the class of projected gradient descent (also known as iterative hard thresholding (IHT)) methods is known to offer the fastest and most scalable sol…
We give a reduction from {\sc clique} to establish that sparse PCA is NP-hard. The reduction has a gap which we use to exclude an FPTAS for sparse PCA (unless P=NP). Under weaker complexity assumptions, we also exclude polynomial constant-factor approximation algorithms.
DC3 uses deep learning to solve hard-constrained optimization problems efficiently.
Iterative Hard Thresholding (IHT) is a class of projected gradient descent methods for optimizing sparsity-constrained minimization models, with the best known efficiency and scalability in practice. As far as we know, the existing IHT-style methods are designed for sparse minimization in primal form. It remains open t…
Paper connects free-energy and low-degree hardness in high-dimensional statistics.
Study on computing and estimating calibration distance, showing hardness and efficiency.
We study the problem of attacking a machine learning model in the hard-label black-box setting, where no model information is revealed except that the attacker can make queries to probe the corresponding hard-label decisions. This is a very challenging problem since the direct extension of state-of-the-art white-box at…
A new algorithm optimizes graph problems faster and more accurately.
Improved iterative hard thresholding for faster, sparser solutions.
Hardness proof for agnostically learning halfspaces from worst-case lattice problems.
Noise makes learning linear thresholds hard, but algorithms can still learn near-optimal thresholds.
This work tackles learning Markov games with adversarial opponents and achieves both average reward and exploitation.
Rotation invariant algorithms fail with hard labels sampled from sparse targets.
This paper presents a novel algorithm, based upon the dependent Dirichlet process mixture model (DDPMM), for clustering batch-sequential data containing an unknown number of evolving clusters. The algorithm is derived via a low-variance asymptotic analysis of the Gibbs sampling algorithm for the DDPMM, and provides a h…
Paper tackles efficient HMM learning with conditional samples.
An evolutionary algorithm (EA) is developed as an alternative to the EM algorithm for parameter estimation in model-based clustering. This EA facilitates a different search of the fitness landscape, i.e., the likelihood surface, utilizing both crossover and mutation. Furthermore, this EA represents an efficient approac…
Hardness proven for neural networks with natural weights.
New algorithm resists contamination in high-dimensional regression with optimal performance.
Study on learning halfspaces under adversarial perturbations, finding computational hardness.
We present a new anytime algorithm that achieves near-optimal regret for any instance of finite stochastic partial monitoring. In particular, the new algorithm achieves the minimax regret, within logarithmic factors, for both "easy" and "hard" problems. For easy problems, it additionally achieves logarithmic individual…
Trading system uses NP-hard optimization to select stocks for high Sharpe ratio trading.
HARFE approximates sparse additive functions using random features and ridge regression.
It is well known that Sparse PCA (Sparse Principal Component Analysis) is NP-hard to solve exactly on worst-case instances. What is the complexity of solving Sparse PCA approximately? Our contributions include: 1) a simple and efficient algorithm that achieves an -approximation; 2) NP-hardness of approximatio…
Combinatorial auctions are formulated as frustrated lattice gases on sparse random graphs, allowing the determination of the optimal revenue by methods of statistical physics. Transitions between computationally easy and hard regimes are found and interpreted in terms of the geometric structure of the space of solution…
A grand challenge in reinforcement learning is intelligent exploration, especially when rewards are sparse or deceptive. Two Atari games serve as benchmarks for such hard-exploration domains: Montezuma's Revenge and Pitfall. On both games, current RL algorithms perform poorly, even those with intrinsic motivation, whic…
ARHT algorithm improves sparsity guarantees in convex optimization.
This paper defends SVMs against poisoning attacks using DBSCAN and hardness proofs.
Neural model with parameterized algorithms improves graph CO problem solving.
Many problems in real life can be converted to combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) on graphs, that is to find a best node state configuration or a network structure such that the designed objective function is optimized under some constraints. However, these problems are notorious for their hardness to solve bec…