Finance
July 2011
We give new algorithms for a variety of randomly-generated instances of computational problems using a linearization technique that reduces to solving a system of linear equations.
These algorithms are derived in the context of learning with structured noise, a notion introduced in this paper. This notion is best illustrated with the learning parities with noise (LPN) problem —well-studied in learning theory and cryptography. In the standard version, we have access to an oracle that, each time we press a button, returns a random vector aGF(2)n together with a bit bGF(2) that was computed as
au+, where uGF(2)n is a secret vector, and GF(2) is a noise bit that is 1 with some probability p. Say p=13 . The goal is to recover u. This task is conjectured to be intractable.
In the structured noise setting we introduce a slight (?) variation of the model: upon pressing a button, we receive (say) 10 random vectors
a1a2a10GF(2)n, and corresponding bits b1b2b10, of which at most 3 are noisy. The oracle may arbitrarily decide which of the 10 bits to make noisy. We exhibit a polynomial-time algorithm to recover the secret vector u given such an oracle. We think this structured noise model may be of independent interest in machine learning.
We discuss generalizations of our result, including learning with more general noise patterns. We also give the first nontrivial algorithms
for two problems, which we show fit in our structured noise framework.
We give a slightly subexponential algorithm for the well-known learning with errors (LWE) problem over GF(q) introduced by Regev for cryptographic uses. Our algorithm works for the case when the gaussian noise is small; which was an open problem.
We also give polynomial-time algorithms for learning the MAJORITY OF PARITIES function of Applebaum et al. for certain parameter values. This function is a special case of Goldreich’s pseudorandom generator.