Robustly Learning Monotone Generalized Linear Models via Data Augmentation

Abstract: We study the task of learning Generalized Linear models (GLMs) in the agnostic model under the Gaussian distribution. We give the first polynomial-time algorithm that achieves a constant-factor approximation for \textit{any} monotone Lipschitz activation. Prior constant-factor GLM learners succeed for a substantially smaller class of activations. Our work resolves a well-known open problem, by developing a robust counterpart to the classical GLMtron algorithm (Kakade et al., 2011). Our robust learner applies more generally, encompassing all monotone activations with bounded $(2+\zeta)$-moments, for any fixed $\zeta>0$ -- a condition that is essentially necessary. To obtain our results, we leverage a novel data augmentation technique with decreasing Gaussian noise injection and prove a number of structural results that may be useful in other settings.