Learning with distributional inverters

Abstract: We generalize the "indirect learning" technique of Furst et. al., 1991 to reduce from learning a concept class over a samplable distribution $\mu$ to learning the same concept class over the uniform distribution. The reduction succeeds when the sampler for $\mu$ is both contained in the target concept class and efficiently invertible in the sense of Impagliazzo & Luby, 1989. We give two applications. - We show that AC0[q] is learnable over any succinctly-described product distribution. AC0[q] is the class of constant-depth Boolean circuits of polynomial size with AND, OR, NOT, and counting modulo $q$ gates of unbounded fanins. Our algorithm runs in randomized quasi-polynomial time and uses membership queries. - If there is a strongly useful natural property in the sense of Razborov & Rudich 1997 -- an efficient algorithm that can distinguish between random strings and strings of non-trivial circuit complexity -- then general polynomial-sized Boolean circuits are learnable over any efficiently samplable distribution in randomized polynomial time, given membership queries to the target function