{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/distributional-generalization-a-new-kind-of","title":"Distributional Generalization: A New Kind of Generalization","arxiv_id":"2009.08092","date":"2020-09-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Preetum Nakkiran","Yamini Bansal"],"abstract":"We introduce a new notion of generalization -- Distributional Generalization -- which roughly states that outputs of a classifier at train and test time are close *as distributions*, as opposed to close in just their average error. For example, if we mislabel 30% of dogs as cats in the train set of CIFAR-10, then a ResNet trained to interpolation will in fact mislabel roughly 30% of dogs as cats on the *test set* as well, while leaving other classes unaffected. This behavior is not captured by classical generalization, which would only consider the average error and not the distribution of errors over the input domain. Our formal conjectures, which are much more general than this example, characterize the form of distributional generalization that can be expected in terms of problem parameters: model architecture, training procedure, number of samples, and data distribution. We give empirical evidence for these conjectures across a variety of domains in machine learning, including neural networks, kernel machines, and decision trees. Our results thus advance our empirical understanding of interpolating classifiers.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.08092v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.08092v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"distributional-generalization-a-new-kind-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/kuangliu/pytorch-cifar","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"2d-object-detection","task_name":"2D Object Detection"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"1x1-convolution","method_name":"1x1 Convolution"},{"method_slug":"average-pooling","method_name":"Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"batch-normalization","method_name":"Batch Normalization"},{"method_slug":"bottleneck-residual-block","method_name":"Bottleneck Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"distributional-generalization","method_name":"Distributional Generalization"},{"method_slug":"global-average-pooling","method_name":"Global Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"kaiming-initialization","method_name":"Kaiming Initialization"},{"method_slug":"max-pooling","method_name":"Max Pooling"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"residual-block","method_name":"Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[{"slug":"distributional-generalization","name":"Distributional Generalization","full_name":"Distributional Generalization"}],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2009.08092","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}