How Many Domains Suffice for Domain Generalization? A Tight Characterization via the Domain Shattering Dimension

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dwork, Cynthia, Hu, Lunjia, Shao, Han
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Dwork, Cynthia
Hu, Lunjia
Shao, Han
author_facet Dwork, Cynthia
Hu, Lunjia
Shao, Han
contents We study a fundamental question of domain generalization: given a family of domains (i.e., data distributions), how many randomly sampled domains do we need to collect data from in order to learn a model that performs reasonably well on every seen and unseen domain in the family? We model this problem in the PAC framework and introduce a new combinatorial measure, which we call the domain shattering dimension. We show that this dimension characterizes the domain sample complexity. Furthermore, we establish a tight quantitative relationship between the domain shattering dimension and the classic VC dimension, demonstrating that every hypothesis class that is learnable in the standard PAC setting is also learnable in our setting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_16704
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Many Domains Suffice for Domain Generalization? A Tight Characterization via the Domain Shattering Dimension
Dwork, Cynthia
Hu, Lunjia
Shao, Han
Machine Learning
We study a fundamental question of domain generalization: given a family of domains (i.e., data distributions), how many randomly sampled domains do we need to collect data from in order to learn a model that performs reasonably well on every seen and unseen domain in the family? We model this problem in the PAC framework and introduce a new combinatorial measure, which we call the domain shattering dimension. We show that this dimension characterizes the domain sample complexity. Furthermore, we establish a tight quantitative relationship between the domain shattering dimension and the classic VC dimension, demonstrating that every hypothesis class that is learnable in the standard PAC setting is also learnable in our setting.
title How Many Domains Suffice for Domain Generalization? A Tight Characterization via the Domain Shattering Dimension
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16704