arXiv:2606.24418cs.LGstat.ML2026-06被引 3

用傅里叶分析证明:小规模数据增强也能达到全量增强的泛化效果。

Data Augmentation: A Fourier Analysis Perspective

  • 基于有限群表示论和傅里叶分析,构建增强效果评估框架。
  • 随机采样部分群元素即可逼近全量增强的最小最大率。
  • 解释了为何计算高效的部分增强仍能保留统计优势。

数据增强是一种利用学习问题中已知不变性的简单且模型无关的方法。给定作用于输入空间的一个群,通过添加每个样本的变换副本扩充训练集。由于其无需修改底层学习算法即可利用对称性,该方法可广泛适用于各类学习任务。然而,这种普适性带来计算开销:当群规模较大时,全量群尺寸的增强迅速变得不可行。这引出一个基本问题:部分数据增强能否在泛化能力和样本复杂度上实现与全量增强相同的统计收益?本文通过傅里叶分析与有限群表示理论,建立了一个通用分析框架。我们证明,在一大类经典学习问题中,基于随机采样子群元素的部分增强,能达到与全量增强相同的最小最大率,仅存在随子集增大而消失的近似误差。结果为部分增强为何能在近似对称下仍保持统计优势提供了理论解释,并回应了关于对称性学习中是否可用计算可扩展方法实现统计最优的近期疑问。此外,我们还证明了一个互补的不可能性结果:若假设空间足够丰富,仅靠严格子集无法实现精确对称性强制,必须对整个群进行平均。这些结果为全量与部分增强、精确与近似对称强制提供了统一视角。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Data augmentation is a simple and model-agnostic approach for exploiting known invariances in learning problems. Given a group acting on the input space, one augments the training set with transformed copies of each sample. Because it exploits symmetries without modifying the underlying learning algorithm, data augmentation can be applied broadly across learning methods. However, this universality comes at a computational cost: when the group is large, full group-sized augmentation quickly becomes computationally infeasible. This raises a fundamental question: Can partial data augmentation achieve the same statistical benefits as full augmentation in terms of generalization and sample complexity? We develop a general framework for investigating this question using Fourier analysis and the representation theory of finite groups. We show that, for a broad class of classical learning problems, partial data augmentation based on a randomly sampled subset of group elements achieves the same minimax rates as full augmentation, up to an approximation error that vanishes as the subset size increases. Our results provide a theoretical explanation for why partial augmentation can retain the statistical benefits of full augmentation despite enforcing symmetry only approximately, and shed light on a recently raised question in learning with symmetries: whether statistically optimal learning under general group invariances can be achieved using computationally scalable methods. Moreover, we prove a complementary impossibility result: enforcing exact invariance via data augmentation requires averaging over the entire group, and cannot be achieved by any strict subset when the hypothesis space is sufficiently expressive. Together, these results provide a unified perspective on full and partial data augmentation, as well as exact and approximate symmetry enforcement.

数据增强傅里叶分析对称性学习

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