English

Spectrally-normalized margin bounds for neural networks

Machine Learning 2017-12-06 v2 Neural and Evolutionary Computing Machine Learning

Abstract

This paper presents a margin-based multiclass generalization bound for neural networks that scales with their margin-normalized "spectral complexity": their Lipschitz constant, meaning the product of the spectral norms of the weight matrices, times a certain correction factor. This bound is empirically investigated for a standard AlexNet network trained with SGD on the mnist and cifar10 datasets, with both original and random labels; the bound, the Lipschitz constants, and the excess risks are all in direct correlation, suggesting both that SGD selects predictors whose complexity scales with the difficulty of the learning task, and secondly that the presented bound is sensitive to this complexity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.08498,
  title  = {Spectrally-normalized margin bounds for neural networks},
  author = {Peter Bartlett and Dylan J. Foster and Matus Telgarsky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.08498},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Comparison to arXiv v1: 1-norm in main bound refined to (2,1)-group-norm. Comparison to NIPS camera ready: typo fixes

R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:29:59.458Z