## Upcoming Events

February 24th, Ran Raz at Theory Lunch
Title: A Time-Space Lower Bound for a Large Class of Learning Problems
We prove a general time-space lower bound that applies for a large class of learning problems and shows that for every problem in that class, any learning algorithm requires either a memory of quadratic size or an exponential number of samples. As a special case, this gives a new proof for the time-space lower bound for parity learning [Raz'16].
Our result is stated in terms of the norm of the matrix that corresponds to the learning problem. Let X and A be two finite sets. Let M: (A \times X) \rightarrow {-1,1} be a matrix. The matrix M corresponds to the following learning problem: An unknown element x \in X was chosen uniformly at random. A learner tries to learn x from a stream of samples, (a_1, b_1), (a_2, b_2)..., where for every i, a_i \in A is chosen uniformly at random and b_i = M(a_i,x).
Let \sigma be the largest singular value of M and note that always (\sigma \leq |A|^{1/2} * |X|^{1/2}). We show that if (\sigma \leq |A|^{1/2} * |X|^{1/2 - \epsilon}), then any learning algorithm for the corresponding learning problem requires either a memory of size quadratic in (\epsilon * n) or number of samples exponential in (\epsilon * n), where n = log(|X|).