Ravi Kannan

Ainesh Bakshi, Chiranjib Bhattacharyya, Ravi Kannan et al.

We consider the problem of learning a latent $k$-vertex simplex $K\subset\mathbb{R}^d$, given access to $A\in\mathbb{R}^{d\times n}$, which can be viewed as a data matrix with $n$ points that are obtained by randomly perturbing latent points in the simplex $K$ (potentially beyond $K$). A large class of latent variable models, such as adversarial clustering, mixed membership stochastic block models, and topic models can be cast as learning a latent simplex. Bhattacharyya and Kannan (SODA, 2020) give an algorithm for learning such a latent simplex in time roughly $O(k\cdot\textrm{nnz}(A))$, where $\textrm{nnz}(A)$ is the number of non-zeros in $A$. We show that the dependence on $k$ in the running time is unnecessary given a natural assumption about the mass of the top $k$ singular values of $A$, which holds in many of these applications. Further, we show this assumption is necessary, as otherwise an algorithm for learning a latent simplex would imply an algorithmic breakthrough for spectral low rank approximation. At a high level, Bhattacharyya and Kannan provide an adaptive algorithm that makes $k$ matrix-vector product queries to $A$ and each query is a function of all queries preceding it. Since each matrix-vector product requires $\textrm{nnz}(A)$ time, their overall running time appears unavoidable. Instead, we obtain a low-rank approximation to $A$ in input-sparsity time and show that the column space thus obtained has small $\sinΘ$ (angular) distance to the right top-$k$ singular space of $A$. Our algorithm then selects $k$ points in the low-rank subspace with the largest inner product with $k$ carefully chosen random vectors. By working in the low-rank subspace, we avoid reading the entire matrix in each iteration and thus circumvent the $Θ(k\cdot\textrm{nnz}(A))$ running time.

Ravi Kannan, Santosh Vempala

We consider the following general hidden hubs model: an $n \times n$ random matrix $A$ with a subset $S$ of $k$ special rows (hubs): entries in rows outside $S$ are generated from the probability distribution $p_0 \sim N(0,σ_0^2)$; for each row in $S$, some $k$ of its entries are generated from $p_1 \sim N(0,σ_1^2)$, $σ_1>σ_0$, and the rest of the entries from $p_0$. The problem is to identify the high-degree hubs efficiently. This model includes and significantly generalizes the planted Gaussian Submatrix Model, where the special entries are all in a $k \times k$ submatrix. There are two well-known barriers: if $k\geq c\sqrt{n\ln n}$, just the row sums are sufficient to find $S$ in the general model. For the submatrix problem, this can be improved by a $\sqrt{\ln n}$ factor to $k \ge c\sqrt{n}$ by spectral methods or combinatorial methods. In the variant with $p_0=\pm 1$ (with probability $1/2$ each) and $p_1\equiv 1$, neither barrier has been broken. We give a polynomial-time algorithm to identify all the hidden hubs with high probability for $k \ge n^{0.5-δ}$ for some $δ>0$, when $σ_1^2>2σ_0^2$. The algorithm extends to the setting where planted entries might have different variances each at least as large as $σ_1^2$. We also show a nearly matching lower bound: for $σ_1^2 \le 2σ_0^2$, there is no polynomial-time Statistical Query algorithm for distinguishing between a matrix whose entries are all from $N(0,σ_0^2)$ and a matrix with $k=n^{0.5-δ}$ hidden hubs for any $δ>0$. The lower bound as well as the algorithm are related to whether the chi-squared distance of the two distributions diverges. At the critical value $σ_1^2=2σ_0^2$, we show that the general hidden hubs problem can be solved for $k\geq c\sqrt n(\ln n)^{1/4}$, improving on the naive row sum-based method.