Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Holland, Matthew J., Hamada, Toma
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.03619
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911337978789888
author Holland, Matthew J.
Hamada, Toma
author_facet Holland, Matthew J.
Hamada, Toma
contents While the traditional formulation of machine learning tasks is in terms of performance on average, in practice we are often interested in how well a trained model performs on rare or difficult data points at test time. To achieve more robust and balanced generalization, methods applying sharpness-aware minimization to a subset of worst-case examples have proven successful for image classification tasks, but only using overparameterized neural networks under which the relative difference between "easy" and "hard" data points becomes negligible. In this work, we show how such a strategy can dramatically break down under simpler models where the difficulty gap becomes more extreme. As a more flexible alternative, instead of typical sharpness, we propose and evaluate a training criterion which penalizes poor loss concentration, which can be easily combined with loss transformations such exponential tilting, conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), or distributionally robust optimization (DRO) that control tail emphasis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_03619
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Making Robust Generalizers Less Rigid with Loss Concentration
Holland, Matthew J.
Hamada, Toma
Machine Learning
While the traditional formulation of machine learning tasks is in terms of performance on average, in practice we are often interested in how well a trained model performs on rare or difficult data points at test time. To achieve more robust and balanced generalization, methods applying sharpness-aware minimization to a subset of worst-case examples have proven successful for image classification tasks, but only using overparameterized neural networks under which the relative difference between "easy" and "hard" data points becomes negligible. In this work, we show how such a strategy can dramatically break down under simpler models where the difficulty gap becomes more extreme. As a more flexible alternative, instead of typical sharpness, we propose and evaluate a training criterion which penalizes poor loss concentration, which can be easily combined with loss transformations such exponential tilting, conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), or distributionally robust optimization (DRO) that control tail emphasis.
title Making Robust Generalizers Less Rigid with Loss Concentration
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.03619