Tighter Information-Theoretic Generalization Bounds from Supersamples

Ziqiao Wang, Yongyi Mao

Abstract: In this work, we present a variety of novel information-theoretic generalization bounds for learning algorithms, from the supersample setting of Steinke & Zakynthinou (2020)—the setting of the ``conditional mutual information'' framework. Our development exploits projecting the loss pair (obtained from a training instance and a testing instance) down to a single number and correlating loss values with a Rademacher sequence (and its shifted variants). The presented bounds include square-root bounds, fast-rate bounds, including those based on variance and sharpness, and bounds for interpolating algorithms etc. We show theoretically or empirically that these bounds are tighter than all information-theoretic bounds known to date on the same supersample setting.

Submission Number: 5565