arXiv AI

Complexity Induction: Compositional Generalization via Structured Label Distortion

arXiv AI
Aug 28

Complexity Induction: Compositional Generalization via Structured Training Distortion

The paper introduces "complexity induction," a method that distorts training data in a structured way to promote compositional generalization in a standard CNN without changing its architecture. Using synthetic images of colored geometric shapes, the authors encode classes as flat string labels (e.g., "red‑circle") and deliberately omit certain color‑shape combinations from training. Two distortion techniques—mixed labels (soft target distributions based on Jaccard similarity) and expanded dataset (false samples with incorrect labels)—both enable the model to predict unseen class combinations, with mixed labels leveraging the CNN’s embedding structure and expanded training improving embedding factorization. A control experiment with random false labels shows that the effect relies on the structured nature of the distortion rather than noise alone.

By Aleksandr V. Abramov
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

The Advantage of Fine-Grained Training

arXiv:2509. 05130v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In classification problems, models are trained to predict a class label based on the input data features.

By Davide Pirovano, Federico Milanesio, Michele Caselle, Piero Fariselli, Matteo Osella
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

eXplaining to Learn (eX2L): Regularization Using Contrastive Visual Explanation Pairs for Distribution Shifts

The paper introduces eXplaining to Learn (eX2L), an interpretable framework that regularizes a classifier by penalizing similarity between Grad‑CAM maps of the main label classifier and a confounder classifier. This approach decorrelates confounding features from latent representations during training. On the Spawrious Many‑to‑Many Hard Challenge benchmark, eX2L outperforms the current state‑of‑the‑art by 5.49% in average accuracy and 10.90% in worst‑group accuracy, while also demonstrating functional domain invariance through explicit label‑nuisance decoupling.

By Paulo Mario P. Medina, Jose Marie Antonio Mi\~noza, Sebastian C. Iba\~nez
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 22

Sublinearly Structured Deep Neural Networks Achieve Feature Learning Consistency for Compositional Functions

Over the past decade, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success on complex machine-learning tasks, yet the theoretical foundations of their performance remain incomplete. From a statistical viewpoint, a natural question is: can DNNs attain feature-learning and prediction consistency comparable to that of classical models?

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

Escaping Parameter Space: Tight Generalization Bounds via Representation Quality

The paper presents a tight generalization bound for deterministic neural networks that relies on the quality of their last hidden layer representations rather than traditional parameter-space metrics. By using a parameter‑free k‑nearest‑neighbor classifier to assess representation quality, the bound decomposes into three measurable components—local class geometry, decoder‑network agreement, and training stability—providing both a non‑vacuous certificate and a diagnostic tool for understanding generalization. Experiments show the bound achieves an 8.0‑percentage‑point gap to test error on CIFAR‑10 with ResNet‑18, yields the first non‑vacuous certificates on CIFAR‑100, and certifies 1.4 % on CIFAR‑10 and 23.1 % on 1,000‑class ImageNet using frozen DINOv2 representations.

By Niclas G\"oring, Shuofeng Zhang, Branton DeMoss, Ard A. Louis
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

HAND: A Biologically-Inspired Activation Function that Improves Generalisation and Sample Efficiency in Image Classification

The paper introduces HAND, a biologically-inspired activation function that incorporates homeostasis, accelerating nonlinearity, and divisive normalization to act as an inductive bias in deep neural networks. Experiments on image classification show that using HAND allows a ConvNeXt-tiny model to reach ImageNet1k accuracy in 25 epochs versus 200 epochs for the baseline, and yields larger accuracy gains on long-tailed and reduced-data settings. The authors report that HAND does not degrade generalisation on common corruptions and can improve the model’s ability to reject unknown classes, with benefits observed across multiple CNN architectures and datasets.

By Michael W. Spratling, Heiko H. Sch\"utt