Robustness and Generalization

We derive generalization bounds for learning algorithms based on their robustness: the property that if a testing sample is "similar" to a training sample, then the testing error is close to the training error. This provides a novel approach, different from the complexity or stability arguments, to study generalization of learning algorithms. We further show that a weak notion of robustness is both sufficient and necessary for generalizability, which implies that robustness is a fundamental property for learning algorithms to work

Local Rademacher Complexity for Multi-Label Learning

© 1992-2012 IEEE. We analyze the local Rademacher complexity of empirical risk minimization-based multi-label learning algorithms, and in doing so propose a new algorithm for multi-label learning. Rather than using the trace norm to regularize the multi-label predictor, we instead minimize the tail sum of the singular values of the predictor in multi-label learning. Benefiting from the use of the local Rademacher complexity, our algorithm, therefore, has a sharper generalization error bound. Compared with methods that minimize over all singular values, concentrating on the tail singular values results in better recovery of the low-rank structure of the multi-label predictor, which plays an important role in exploiting label correlations. We propose a new conditional singular value thresholding algorithm to solve the resulting objective function. Moreover, a variance control strategy is employed to reduce the variance of variables in optimization. Empirical studies on real-world data sets validate our theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for multi-label learning