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Poster

Learning a Single Index Model from Anisotropic Data with Vanilla Stochastic Gradient Descent

Naonori Ueda · Masaaki Imaizumi


Abstract: We investigate the problem of learning a Single Index Model (SIM) from anisotropic Gaussian inputs by training a neuron using vanilla Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). Our analysis shows that, unlike spherical SGD -- which is commonly used for theoretical analysis and requires estimating the covariance matrix QRd×d -- vanilla SGDcan naturally adapt to the covariance structure of the data without additional modifications. Our key theoretical contribution is a dimension-free upper bound on the sample complexity, which depends on Q, its alignment with the single index w, and the information exponent k. We complement this upper bound with a Correlated Statistical Query (CSQ) lower bound that matches the upper bound on average over w, although it is suboptimal in k. Finally, we validate and extend our theoretical findings through numerical simulations, demonstrating the practical effectiveness of vanilla SGD in this context.

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