Generalization Bounds for Label Noise Stochastic Gradient Descent

Abstract

We develop generalization error bounds for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with label noise in non-convex settings under uniform dissipativity and smoothness conditions. Under a suitable choice of semimetric, we establish a contraction in Wasserstein distance of the label noise stochastic gradient flow that depends polynomially on the parameter dimension d. Using the framework of algorithmic stability, we derive time-independent generalisation error bounds for the discretized algorithm with a constant learning rate. The error bound we achieve scales polynomially with d and with the rate of n^-2/3, where n is the sample size. This rate is better than the best-known rate of n^-1/2 established for stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) -- which employs parameter-independent Gaussian noise -- under similar conditions. Our analysis offers quantitative insights into the effect of label noise.

Tasks

Reproductions