Abstract: The talk will focus on optimization on the high-dimensional sphere when the objective function is a linear combination of homogeneous polynomials with standard Gaussian coefficients. Such random processes are called spherical spin glasses in physics, and have been extensively studied since the 80s. I will describe certain geometric properties of spherical spin glasses unique to the full-RSB case, and explain how they can be used to design a polynomial time algorithm that finds points within small multiplicative error from…

Abstract: This talk will present a class of exponential bounds for the probability that a martingale sequence crosses a time-dependent linear threshold. Our key insight is that it is both natural and fruitful to formulate exponential concentration inequalities in this way. We will illustrate this point by presenting a single assumption and a single theorem that together strengthen many tail bounds for martingales, including classical inequalities (1960-80) by Bernstein, Bennett, Hoeffding, and Freedman; contemporary inequalities (1980-2000) by Shorack and Wellner,…

Abstract: Logistic regression is a fundamental task in machine learning and statistics. For the simple case of linear models, Hazan et al. (2014) showed that any logistic regression algorithm that estimates model weights from samples must exhibit exponential dependence on the weight magnitude. As an alternative, we explore a counterintuitive technique called improper learning, whereby one estimates a linear model by fitting a non-linear model. Past success stories for improper learning have focused on cases where it can improve computational…

Abstract: Chao Gao will discuss the problem of statistical estimation with contaminated data. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss depth-based approaches that achieve minimax rates in various problems. In general, the minimax rate of a given problem with contamination consists of two terms: the statistical complexity without contamination, and the contamination effect in the form of modulus of continuity. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss computational challenges of these depth-based estimators. An…

Given a symmetric social network, we are interested in testing whether it has only one community or multiple communities. The desired tests should (a) accommodate severe degree heterogeneity, (b) accommodate mixed-memberships, (c) have a tractable null distribution, and (d) adapt automatically to different levels of sparsity, and achieve the optimal detection boundary. How to find such a test is a challenging problem. We propose the Signed Polygon as a class of new tests. Fix m ≥ 3. For each m-gon…

Abstract: We consider the problem of efficient sampling from the hard-core and Potts models from statistical physics. On certain families of graphs, phase transitions in the underlying physics model are linked to changes in the performance of some sampling algorithms, including Markov chains. We develop new sampling and counting algorithms that exploit the phase transition phenomenon and work efficiently on lattices (and bipartite expander graphs) at sufficiently low temperatures in the phase coexistence regime. Our algorithms are based on Pirogov-Sinai…