arrow
Return

Gentle local robustness implies generalization

delete2025-04-24
delete0
PRE
AI
K
Khoat Than *
D
Dat Phan
G
Giang Vu
DOI:10.1007/s10994-025-06775-4delete
deleteOriginal
deleteOriginal request for help
deleteShare
deleteSave
Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Robustness and generalization ability of machine learning models are of utmost importance in various application domains. There is a wide interest in efficient ways to analyze those properties. One important direction is to analyze connection between those two properties. Prior theories suggest that a robust learning algorithm can produce trained models with a high generalization ability. However, we show in this work that the existing error bounds are vacuous for the Bayes optimal classifier which is the best among all measurable classifiers for a classification problem with overlapping classes. Those bounds cannot converge to the true error of this ideal classifier. This is undesirable, surprizing, and never known before. We then present a class of novel bounds, which are model-dependent and provably tighter than the existing robustness-based ones. Unlike prior ones, our bounds are guaranteed to converge to the true error of the best classifier, as the number of samples increases. We further provide an extensive experiment and find that two of our bounds are often non-vacuous for a large class of deep neural networks, pretrained from ImageNet.
Keywords:
Model robustness
Generalization ability
Error bound

Journal

Machine Learning cover
Machine Learning
IF:
2.9
Papers:
2.6K
Citations:
3.4W

Organization

V
vinbigdata inst
Scholars:
1
Papers: 1
Citations: 0
H
Hanoi University of Science and Technology
Scholars:
675
Papers: 324
Citations: 2.1K