Probing out-of-distribution generalization in machine learning for materials

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Li, Kangming, Rubungo, Andre Niyongabo, Lei, Xiangyun, Persaud, Daniel, Choudhary, Kamal, DeCost, Brian, Dieng, Adji Bousso, Hattrick-Simpers, Jason
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Li, Kangming
Rubungo, Andre Niyongabo
Lei, Xiangyun
Persaud, Daniel
Choudhary, Kamal
DeCost, Brian
Dieng, Adji Bousso
Hattrick-Simpers, Jason
author_facet Li, Kangming
Rubungo, Andre Niyongabo
Lei, Xiangyun
Persaud, Daniel
Choudhary, Kamal
DeCost, Brian
Dieng, Adji Bousso
Hattrick-Simpers, Jason
contents Scientific machine learning (ML) endeavors to develop generalizable models with broad applicability. However, the assessment of generalizability is often based on heuristics. Here, we demonstrate in the materials science setting that heuristics based evaluations lead to substantially biased conclusions of ML generalizability and benefits of neural scaling. We evaluate generalization performance in over 700 out-of-distribution tasks that features new chemistry or structural symmetry not present in the training data. Surprisingly, good performance is found in most tasks and across various ML models including simple boosted trees. Analysis of the materials representation space reveals that most tasks contain test data that lie in regions well covered by training data, while poorly-performing tasks contain mainly test data outside the training domain. For the latter case, increasing training set size or training time has marginal or even adverse effects on the generalization performance, contrary to what the neural scaling paradigm assumes. Our findings show that most heuristically-defined out-of-distribution tests are not genuinely difficult and evaluate only the ability to interpolate. Evaluating on such tasks rather than the truly challenging ones can lead to an overestimation of generalizability and benefits of scaling.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_06489
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Probing out-of-distribution generalization in machine learning for materials
Li, Kangming
Rubungo, Andre Niyongabo
Lei, Xiangyun
Persaud, Daniel
Choudhary, Kamal
DeCost, Brian
Dieng, Adji Bousso
Hattrick-Simpers, Jason
Materials Science
Scientific machine learning (ML) endeavors to develop generalizable models with broad applicability. However, the assessment of generalizability is often based on heuristics. Here, we demonstrate in the materials science setting that heuristics based evaluations lead to substantially biased conclusions of ML generalizability and benefits of neural scaling. We evaluate generalization performance in over 700 out-of-distribution tasks that features new chemistry or structural symmetry not present in the training data. Surprisingly, good performance is found in most tasks and across various ML models including simple boosted trees. Analysis of the materials representation space reveals that most tasks contain test data that lie in regions well covered by training data, while poorly-performing tasks contain mainly test data outside the training domain. For the latter case, increasing training set size or training time has marginal or even adverse effects on the generalization performance, contrary to what the neural scaling paradigm assumes. Our findings show that most heuristically-defined out-of-distribution tests are not genuinely difficult and evaluate only the ability to interpolate. Evaluating on such tasks rather than the truly challenging ones can lead to an overestimation of generalizability and benefits of scaling.
title Probing out-of-distribution generalization in machine learning for materials
topic Materials Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06489