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The Computational Complexity of Training ReLU(s)

1 Pith paper cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

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abstract

We consider the computational complexity of training depth-2 neural networks composed of rectified linear units (ReLUs). We show that, even for the case of a single ReLU, finding a set of weights that minimizes the squared error (even approximately) for a given training set is NP-hard. We also show that for a simple network consisting of two ReLUs, the error minimization problem is NP-hard, even in the realizable case. We complement these hardness results by showing that, when the weights and samples belong to the unit ball, one can (agnostically) properly and reliably learn depth-2 ReLUs with $k$ units and error at most $\epsilon$ in time $2^{(k/\epsilon)^{O(1)}}n^{O(1)}$; this extends upon a previous work of Goel, Kanade, Klivans and Thaler (2017) which provided efficient improper learning algorithms for ReLUs.

fields

cs.DS 1

years

2026 1

verdicts

UNVERDICTED 1

representative citing papers

Equivalence of Coarse and Fine-Grained Models for Learning with Distribution Shift

cs.DS · 2026-05-07 · unverdicted · novelty 8.0 · 2 refs

An efficient black-box reduction from PQ to TDS learning for any Boolean concept class in the distribution-free setting implies hardness for TDS learning of halfspaces, while membership queries enable efficient PQ learning of halfspaces via iterative Forster transforms.

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  • Equivalence of Coarse and Fine-Grained Models for Learning with Distribution Shift cs.DS · 2026-05-07 · unverdicted · none · ref 195 · 2 links · internal anchor

    An efficient black-box reduction from PQ to TDS learning for any Boolean concept class in the distribution-free setting implies hardness for TDS learning of halfspaces, while membership queries enable efficient PQ learning of halfspaces via iterative Forster transforms.