Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: We study the problem of learning a drifting concept in the presence of Massart noise. In this framework, an online learner has access to a history of independent samples whose labels are noisy versions of a target concept that may change from round to round. The goal is to output, in each round, a hypothesis with small prediction error. We study the complexity of this learning problem for the fundamental class of margin-separable linear classifiers (halfspaces). On the positive side, we give a computationally efficient learner achieving error $η+ \tilde O(Δ^{1/3}/γ)$, where $η$ upper bounds the Massart noise rate, $Δ$ is the drift rate, and $γ$ is the margin. Interestingly, in the realizable setting, an adaptation of our techniques yields an efficient learner with an improved error rate over prior work. On the lower-bound side, we provide formal evidence of an information-computation tradeoff, strongly suggesting that our algorithm's performance is essentially optimal. Specifically, while the information-theoretically optimal error scales with $Δ^{1/2}$, we prove that $Δ^{1/3}$-scaling is unavoidable for low-degree polynomial tests, even in the special case of random classification noise.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institution: University of Wisconsin–Madison
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: CAREER: Optimization and Learning with Changing Distributions, Collaborative Research: AF: Medium: Algorithmic High-Dimensional Robust Statistics, Collaborative Research: MFAI: Mathematical Frontiers of Generative AI, G6098521345, G6671297155, CAREER: Learning Algorithms with Robustness and Efficiency Guarantees, G8876996369
OpenAlex ID: W7164182186
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