English

Norm-based Generalization Bounds for Compositionally Sparse Neural Networks

Machine Learning 2023-01-31 v1

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the Rademacher complexity of deep sparse neural networks, where each neuron receives a small number of inputs. We prove generalization bounds for multilayered sparse ReLU neural networks, including convolutional neural networks. These bounds differ from previous ones, as they consider the norms of the convolutional filters instead of the norms of the associated Toeplitz matrices, independently of weight sharing between neurons. As we show theoretically, these bounds may be orders of magnitude better than standard norm-based generalization bounds and empirically, they are almost non-vacuous in estimating generalization in various simple classification problems. Taken together, these results suggest that compositional sparsity of the underlying target function is critical to the success of deep neural networks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.12033,
  title  = {Norm-based Generalization Bounds for Compositionally Sparse Neural Networks},
  author = {Tomer Galanti and Mengjia Xu and Liane Galanti and Tomaso Poggio},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.12033},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:24:12.561Z