Efficiently learning halfspaces with Tsybakov noise

We study the problem of PAC learning homogeneous halfspaces in the presence of Tsybakov noise. In the Tsybakov noise model, the label of every sample is independently flipped with an adversarially controlled probability that can be arbitrarily close to 1/2 for a fraction of the samples. We give the first polynomial-time algorithm for this fundamental learning problem. Our algorithm learns the true halfspace within any desired accuracy 𝜖 and succeeds under a broad family of well-behaved distributions including log-concave distributions. Prior to our work, the only previous algorithm for this problem required quasi-polynomial runtime in 1/𝜖. Our algorithm employs a recently developed reduction [29] from learning to certifying the non-optimality of a candidate halfspace. This prior work developed a quasi-polynomial time certificate algorithm based on polynomial regression. The main technical contribution of the current paper is the first polynomial-time certificate algorithm. Starting from a non-trivial warm-start, our algorithm performs a novel "win-win" iterative process which, at each step, either finds a valid certificate or improves the angle between the current halfspace and the true one. Our warm-start algorithm for isotropic log-concave distributions involves a number of analytic tools that may be of broader interest. These include a new efficient method for reweighting the distribution in order to recenter it and a novel characterization of the spectrum of the degree-2 Chow parameters.