We give a simple, more efficient and uniform proof of the hard-core lemma, a fundamental result in complexity theory with applications in machine learning and cryptography. Our result follows from the connection between boosting algorithms and hard-core set constructions discovered by Klivans and Servedio. Informally stated, our result is the following: suppose we fix a family of boolean functions. Assume there is an efficient algorithm which for every input length and every smooth distribution (i.e. one that doesn’t assign too much weight to any single input) over the inputs produces a circuit such that the circuit computes the boolean function noticeably better than random. Then, there is an efficient algorithm which for every input length produces a circuit that computes the function correctly on almost all inputs.

Our algorithm significantly simplifies previous proofs of the uniform and the non-uniform hard-core lemma, while matching or improving the previously best known parameters. The algorithm uses a generalized multiplicative update rule combined with a natural notion of approximate Bregman projection. Bregman projections are widely used in convex optimization and machine learning. We present an algorithm which efficiently approximates the Bregman projection onto the set of high density measures when the Kullback-Leibler divergence is used as a distance function. Our algorithm has a logarithmic runtime over any domain provided that we can efficiently sample from this domain. High density measures correspond to smooth distributions which arise naturally, for instance, in the context of online learning. Hence, our technique may be of independent interest.