Generalization error bounds are critical to understanding the performance of machine learning models. In this work, building upon a new bound of the expected value of an arbitrary function of the population and empirical risk of a learning algorithm, we offer a more refined analysis of the generalization behaviour of a machine learning models based on a characterization of (bounds) to their generalization error moments. We discuss how the proposed bounds -- which also encompass new bounds to the expected generalization error -- relate to existing bounds in the literature. We also discuss how the proposed generalization error moment bounds can be used to construct new generalization error high-probability bounds.
We present a general approach to deriving bounds on the generalization error of randomized learning algorithms. Our approach can be used to obtain bounds on the average generalization error as well as bounds on its tail probabilities, both for the case in which a new hypothesis is randomly generated every time the algorithm is used - as often assumed in the probably approximately correct (PAC)-Bayesian literature - and in the single-draw case, where the hypothesis is extracted only once. For this last scenario, we present a novel bound that is explicit in the central moments of the information…
We derive upper bounds on the generalization error of a learning algorithm in terms of the mutual information between its input and output. The bounds provide an information-theoretic understanding of generalization in learning problems, and give theoretical guidelines for striking the right balance between data fit and generalization by controlling the input-output mutual information. We propose a number of methods for this purpose, among which are algorithms that regularize the ERM algorithm with relative entropy or with random noise. Our work extends and leads to nontrivial improvements on …
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum is widely used for training modern deep learning architectures. While it is well-understood that using momentum can lead to faster convergence rate in various settings, it has also been observed that momentum yields higher generalization. Prior work argue that momentum stabilizes the SGD noise during training and this leads to higher generalization. In this paper, we adopt another perspective and first empirically show that gradient descent with momentum (GD+M) significantly improves generalization compared to gradient descent (GD) in some deep l…
While momentum-based methods, in conjunction with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work, we first show that there exists a convex loss function for which algorithmic stability fails to establish generalization guarantees when SGD with standard heavy-ball momentum (SGDM) is run for multiple epochs. Then, for smooth Lipschitz loss functions, we analyze a modified momentum-based update rule, i.e., SGD with early momentum (SGDEM), and show that it …
Johannes Kepler University Linz（林茨约翰内斯·开普勒大学）；Data Science Software Competence Center Hagenberg GmbH（哈根贝格数据科学软件能力中心有限公司）
Domain adaptation algorithms are designed to minimize the misclassification risk of a discriminative model for a target domain with little training data by adapting a model from a source domain with a large amount of training data. Standard approaches measure the adaptation discrepancy based on distance measures between the empirical probability distributions in the source and target domain. In this setting, we address the problem of deriving generalization bounds under practice-oriented general conditions on the underlying probability distributions. As a result, we obtain generalization bound…
In this paper we study the problem of convergence and generalization error bound of stochastic momentum for deep learning from the perspective of regularization. To do so, we first interpret momentum as solving an $\ell_2$-regularized minimization problem to learn the offsets between arbitrary two successive model parameters. We call this {\em time-delay momentum} because the model parameter is updated after a few iterations towards finding the minimizer. We then propose our learning algorithm, \ie stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with time-delay momentum. We show that our algorithm can be in…
This paper follows up on a recent work of Neu et al. (2021) and presents some new information-theoretic upper bounds for the generalization error of machine learning models, such as neural networks, trained with SGD. We apply these bounds to analyzing the generalization behaviour of linear and two-layer ReLU networks. Experimental study of these bounds provide some insights on the SGD training of neural networks. They also point to a new and simple regularization scheme which we show performs comparably to the current state of the art.
Some of the tightest information-theoretic generalization bounds depend on the average information between the learned hypothesis and a single training example. However, these sample-wise bounds were derived only for expected generalization gap. We show that even for expected squared generalization gap no such sample-wise information-theoretic bounds exist. The same is true for PAC-Bayes and single-draw bounds. Remarkably, PAC-Bayes, single-draw and expected squared generalization gap bounds that depend on information in pairs of examples exist.
On the Generalization of Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum
University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；Visual Intelligence Centre（视觉智能中心）；Integreat, Norwegian Centre for Knowledge-driven Machine Learning（Integreat，挪威知识驱动机器学习中心）；EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Laboratory for Information and Inference Systems (LIONS), EPFL（信息与推理系统实验室（LIONS），洛桑联邦理工学院）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Tehran Institute for Advanced Studies, Khatam University（哈塔姆大学德黑兰高等研究院）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；ENS – PSL Research University（PSL研究大学巴黎高等师范学院）
Understanding generalization in modern machine learning settings has been one of the major challenges in statistical learning theory. In this context, recent years have witnessed the development of various generalization bounds suggesting different complexity notions such as the mutual information between the data sample and the algorithm output, compressibility of the hypothesis space, and the fractal dimension of the hypothesis space. While these bounds have illuminated the problem at hand from different angles, their suggested complexity notions might appear seemingly unrelated, thereby res…
Paris Research Center, Huawei Technologies France（华为技术法国巴黎研究中心）；Université Paris-Est（巴黎东大学）
In this paper, we use tools from rate-distortion theory to establish new upper bounds on the generalization error of statistical distributed learning algorithms. Specifically, there are $K$ clients whose individually chosen models are aggregated by a central server. The bounds depend on the compressibility of each client's algorithm while keeping other clients' algorithms un-compressed, and leverage the fact that small changes in each local model change the aggregated model by a factor of only $1/K$. Adopting a recently proposed approach by Sefidgaran et al., and extending it suitably to the d…
USC Information Sciences Institute（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
We derive information-theoretic generalization bounds for supervised learning algorithms based on the information contained in predictions rather than in the output of the training algorithm. These bounds improve over the existing information-theoretic bounds, are applicable to a wider range of algorithms, and solve two key challenges: (a) they give meaningful results for deterministic algorithms and (b) they are significantly easier to estimate. We show experimentally that the proposed bounds closely follow the generalization gap in practical scenarios for deep learning.
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；RIKEN Center for AIP（理化学研究所人工智能中心）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Beijing Institute of Big Data Research（北京大数据研究院）
It is well-known that stochastic gradient noise (SGN) acts as implicit regularization for deep learning and is essentially important for both optimization and generalization of deep networks. Some works attempted to artificially simulate SGN by injecting random noise to improve deep learning. However, it turned out that the injected simple random noise cannot work as well as SGN, which is anisotropic and parameter-dependent. For simulating SGN at low computational costs and without changing the learning rate or batch size, we propose the Positive-Negative Momentum (PNM) approach that is a powe…
Using information-theoretic principles, we consider the generalization error (gen-error) of iterative semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms that iteratively generate pseudo-labels for a large amount of unlabelled data to progressively refine the model parameters. In contrast to most previous works that {\em bound} the gen-error, we provide an {\em exact} expression for the gen-error and particularize it to the binary Gaussian mixture model. Our theoretical results suggest that when the class conditional variances are not too large, the gen-error decreases with the number of iterations, but…
We derive a novel information-theoretic analysis of the generalization property of meta-learning algorithms. Concretely, our analysis proposes a generic understanding of both the conventional learning-to-learn framework and the modern model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) algorithms. Moreover, we provide a data-dependent generalization bound for a stochastic variant of MAML, which is non-vacuous for deep few-shot learning. As compared to previous bounds that depend on the square norm of gradients, empirical validations on both simulated data and a well-known few-shot benchmark show that our boun…
University of Science & Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Recently, the information-theoretical framework has been proven to be able to obtain non-vacuous generalization bounds for large models trained by Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) with isotropic noise. In this paper, we optimize the information-theoretical generalization bound by manipulating the noise structure in SGLD. We prove that with constraint to guarantee low empirical risk, the optimal noise covariance is the square root of the expected gradient covariance if both the prior and the posterior are jointly optimized. This validates that the optimal noise is quite close to the…
Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Element AI（Element AI公司）；Mila（米拉实验室）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（矢量研究院）
We study the generalization properties of the popular stochastic optimization method known as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for optimizing general non-convex loss functions. Our main contribution is providing upper bounds on the generalization error that depend on local statistics of the stochastic gradients evaluated along the path of iterates calculated by SGD. The key factors our bounds depend on are the variance of the gradients (with respect to the data distribution) and the local smoothness of the objective function along the SGD path, and the sensitivity of the loss function to pert…
Meta-learning, or "learning to learn", refers to techniques that infer an inductive bias from data corresponding to multiple related tasks with the goal of improving the sample efficiency for new, previously unobserved, tasks. A key performance measure for meta-learning is the meta-generalization gap, that is, the difference between the average loss measured on the meta-training data and on a new, randomly selected task. This paper presents novel information-theoretic upper bounds on the meta-generalization gap. Two broad classes of meta-learning algorithms are considered that uses either sepa…
Generalization Bounds for Transformer Channel Decoders
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；University Town of Shenzhen, Nanshan District, Shenzhen（深圳大学城，南山区，深圳）
A Unified Information-Theoretic Framework for Meta-Learning Generalization
School of Computer Science of Technology（科技学院计算机科学系）；School of Biomedical Informatics（生物医学信息学系）；Department of Oncology（肿瘤学系）；Department of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术系）
Information-Theoretic Generalization Bounds of Replay-based Continual Learning
School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Department of Oncology, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学肿瘤学系）；China Telecom, China（中国电信）；Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学计算机科学与技术系）
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；The University of Iowa（爱荷华大学）
Stochastic momentum methods have been widely adopted in training deep neural networks. However, their theoretical analysis of convergence of the training objective and the generalization error for prediction is still under-explored. This paper aims to bridge the gap between practice and theory by analyzing the stochastic gradient (SG) method, and the stochastic momentum methods including two famous variants, i.e., the stochastic heavy-ball (SHB) method and the stochastic variant of Nesterov's accelerated gradient (SNAG) method. We propose a framework that unifies the three variants. We then de…
Recently, Mutual Information (MI) has attracted attention in bounding the generalization error of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, it is intractable to accurately estimate the MI in DNNs, thus most previous works have to relax the MI bound, which in turn weakens the information theoretic explanation for generalization. To address the limitation, this paper introduces a probabilistic representation of DNNs for accurately estimating the MI. Leveraging the proposed MI estimator, we validate the information theoretic explanation for generalization, and derive a tighter generalization bound th…
Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院维特比电气与电子工程学院）
Autoencoders are widely used for unsupervised learning and as a regularization scheme in semi-supervised learning. However, theoretical understanding of their generalization properties and of the manner in which they can assist supervised learning has been lacking. We utilize recent advances in the theory of deep learning generalization, together with a novel reconstruction loss, to provide generalization bounds for autoencoders. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such bound. We further show that, under appropriate assumptions, an autoencoder with good generalization properties ca…
Peking University（北京大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Algorithm-dependent generalization error bounds are central to statistical learning theory. A learning algorithm may use a large hypothesis space, but the limited number of iterations controls its model capacity and generalization error. The impacts of stochastic gradient methods on generalization error for non-convex learning problems not only have important theoretical consequences, but are also critical to generalization errors of deep learning. In this paper, we study the generalization errors of Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) with non-convex objectives. Two theories are prop…
Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, MIT（麻省理工学院脑、心智与机器中心）
While deep learning is successful in a number of applications, it is not yet well understood theoretically. A satisfactory theoretical characterization of deep learning however, is beginning to emerge. It covers the following questions: 1) representation power of deep networks 2) optimization of the empirical risk 3) generalization properties of gradient descent techniques --- why the expected error does not suffer, despite the absence of explicit regularization, when the networks are overparametrized? In this review we discuss recent advances in the three areas. In approximation theory both s…
Stability and Generalization for Stochastic Recursive Momentum-based Algorithms for (Strongly-)Convex One to $K$-Level Stochastic Optimizations
Central South University（中南大学）；Tulane University（杜兰大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
本文基于算法稳定性分析 STORM、COVER 和 SVMR 在凸与强凸一至 K 层随机优化中的泛化性，建立稳定性与超额风险界，并揭示估计器方差、层级增加及批量大小的影响。
