Universal generalization guarantees for Wasserstein distributionally robust models

Published: 22 Jan 2025, Last Modified: 18 Feb 2025ICLR 2025 SpotlightEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: generalization guarantees, optimal transport, distributionally robust optimization, nonsmooth analysis
TL;DR: Exact generalization guarantees for Wasserstein distributionally robust models with dimension-free sample rates.
Abstract: Distributionally robust optimization has emerged as an attractive way to train robust machine learning models, capturing data uncertainty and distribution shifts. Recent statistical analyses have proved that generalization guarantees of robust models based on the Wasserstein distance have generalization guarantees that do not suffer from the curse of dimensionality. However, these results are either approximate, obtained in specific cases, or based on assumptions difficult to verify in practice. In contrast, we establish exact generalization guarantees that cover a wide range of cases, with arbitrary transport costs and parametric loss functions, including deep learning objectives with nonsmooth activations. We complete our analysis with an excess bound on the robust objective and an extension to Wasserstein robust models with entropic regularizations.
Primary Area: optimization
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Submission Number: 10606
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