Eigenvalue Decay Implies Polynomial-Time Learnability for Neural Networks

We consider the problem of learning function classes computed by neural networks with various activations (e.g. ReLU or Sigmoid), a task believed to be computationally intractable in the worst-case. A major open problem is to understand the minimal assumptions under which these classes admit provably efficient algorithms. In this work we show that a natural distributional assumption corresponding to eigenvalue decay of the Gram matrix yields polynomial-time algorithms in the non-realizable setting for expressive classes of networks (e.g.