English

A path-norm toolkit for modern networks: consequences, promises and challenges

Machine Learning 2024-12-05 v5 Machine Learning Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

This work introduces the first toolkit around path-norms that fully encompasses general DAG ReLU networks with biases, skip connections and any operation based on the extraction of order statistics: max pooling, GroupSort etc. This toolkit notably allows us to establish generalization bounds for modern neural networks that are not only the most widely applicable path-norm based ones, but also recover or beat the sharpest known bounds of this type. These extended path-norms further enjoy the usual benefits of path-norms: ease of computation, invariance under the symmetries of the network, and improved sharpness on layered fully-connected networks compared to the product of operator norms, another complexity measure most commonly used. The versatility of the toolkit and its ease of implementation allow us to challenge the concrete promises of path-norm-based generalization bounds, by numerically evaluating the sharpest known bounds for ResNets on ImageNet.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.01225,
  title  = {A path-norm toolkit for modern networks: consequences, promises and challenges},
  author = {Antoine Gonon and Nicolas Brisebarre and Elisa Riccietti and Rémi Gribonval},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.01225},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Erratum: in the published version there was a typo in the definition of the activation matrix in Definition A.3. This is fixed with this new version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:38:19.545Z