Sharper Generalization Bounds for Learning with Gradient-dominated Objective Functions

Yunwen Lei, Yiming Ying

Keywords: generalization bounds, non-convex learning

Abstract: Stochastic optimization has become the workhorse behind many successful machine learning applications, which motivates a lot of theoretical analysis to understand its empirical behavior. As a comparison, there is far less work to study the generalization behavior especially in a non-convex learning setting. In this paper, we study the generalization behavior of stochastic optimization by leveraging the algorithmic stability for learning with $\beta$-gradient-dominated objective functions. We develop generalization bounds of the order $O(1/(n\beta))$ plus the convergence rate of the optimization algorithm, where $n$ is the sample size. Our stability analysis significantly improves the existing non-convex analysis by removing the bounded gradient assumption and implying better generalization bounds. We achieve this improvement by exploiting the smoothness of loss functions instead of the Lipschitz condition in Charles & Papailiopoulos (2018). We apply our general results to various stochastic optimization algorithms, which show clearly how the variance-reduction techniques improve not only training but also generalization. Furthermore, our discussion explains how interpolation helps generalization for highly expressive models.

One-sentence Summary: We develop sharper generalization bounds for learning with gradient-dominated objective functions.

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