在线性模型中,即使数据分布不同,过拟合仍可泛化良好。
Benign Overfitting in Out-of-Distribution Generalization of Linear Models
- 在协变量偏移下,通过结构化目标协方差证明岭回归可实现良性过拟合。
- 当目标协方差满足条件时,测试误差收敛速率达 $O(1/n)$,优于普通 $O(1/ ext{sqrt}(n))$。
- 结果适用于分布外学习,对研究鲁棒性与高维模型有重要参考价值。
良性过拟合指过参数模型虽完美拟合训练数据(含噪声)却仍能良好泛化至未见测试数据。现有理论多限于同分布设定,而现代机器学习常面临分布外(OOD)挑战,即测试分布与训练分布差异较大。本文首次探究线性模型在协变量偏移下的良性过拟合现象,给出非渐近保证:在目标协方差满足特定结构条件下,标准岭回归在分布外设置下仍可实现良性过拟合。我们识别出源与目标协方差间若干关键量,决定分布外泛化性能。该结果为精确的,可严格恢复先前同分布情形下的良性过拟合结论 [Tsigler and Bartlett, 2023],以及低维分布外设定下的已有保证 [Ge et al., 2024]。此外,针对更一般的靶向协方差族,标准岭回归仅能达到 $O(1/ ext{sqrt}(n))$ 的缓慢统计速率,而主成分回归(PCR)则保证达到快速率 $O(1/n)$,其中 $n$ 为样本数。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Benign overfitting refers to the phenomenon where an over-parameterized model fits the training data perfectly, including noise in the data, but still generalizes well to the unseen test data. While prior work provides some theoretical understanding of this phenomenon under the in-distribution setup, modern machine learning often operates in a more challenging Out-of-Distribution (OOD) regime, where the target (test) distribution can be rather different from the source (training) distribution. In this work, we take an initial step towards understanding benign overfitting in the OOD regime by focusing on the basic setup of over-parameterized linear models under covariate shift. We provide non-asymptotic guarantees proving that benign overfitting occurs in standard ridge regression, even under the OOD regime when the target covariance satisfies certain structural conditions. We identify several vital quantities relating to source and target covariance, which govern the performance of OOD generalization. Our result is sharp, which provably recovers prior in-distribution benign overfitting guarantee [Tsigler and Bartlett, 2023], as well as under-parameterized OOD guarantee [Ge et al., 2024] when specializing to each setup. Moreover, we also present theoretical results for a more general family of target covariance matrix, where standard ridge regression only achieves a slow statistical rate of $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ for the excess risk, while Principal Component Regression (PCR) is guaranteed to achieve the fast rate $O(1/n)$, where $n$ is the number of samples.
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