{"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/for-self-supervised-learning-rationality-1","title":"For self-supervised learning, Rationality implies generalization, provably","arxiv_id":"2010.08508","date":"2020-10-16","proceeding":"ICLR 2021 1","authors":["Yamini Bansal","Gal Kaplun","Boaz Barak"],"abstract":"We prove a new upper bound on the generalization gap of classifiers that are obtained by first using self-supervision to learn a representation $r$ of the training data, and then fitting a simple (e.g., linear) classifier $g$ to the labels. Specifically, we show that (under the assumptions described below) the generalization gap of such classifiers tends to zero if $\\mathsf{C}(g) \\ll n$, where $\\mathsf{C}(g)$ is an appropriately-defined measure of the simple classifier $g$'s complexity, and $n$ is the number of training samples. We stress that our bound is independent of the complexity of the representation $r$. We do not make any structural or conditional-independence assumptions on the representation-learning task, which can use the same training dataset that is later used for classification. Rather, we assume that the training procedure satisfies certain natural noise-robustness (adding small amount of label noise causes small degradation in performance) and rationality (getting the wrong label is not better than getting no label at all) conditions that widely hold across many standard architectures. We show that our bound is non-vacuous for many popular representation-learning based classifiers on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, including SimCLR, AMDIM and MoCo.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.08508v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.08508v1.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":"for-self-supervised-learning-rationality-1","repo_url":"https://gitlab.com/harvard-machine-learning/rationality-generalization","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"for-self-supervised-learning-rationality-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/ICLR2021-rep-gen/Rationality-Generalization","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"representation-learning","task_name":"Representation Learning"},{"task_slug":"self-supervised-learning","task_name":"Self-Supervised Learning"}],"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":"colorjitter","method_name":"ColorJitter"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"feedforward-network","method_name":"Feedforward Network"},{"method_slug":"global-average-pooling","method_name":"Global Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"infonce","method_name":"InfoNCE"},{"method_slug":"kaiming-initialization","method_name":"Kaiming Initialization"},{"method_slug":"max-pooling","method_name":"Max Pooling"},{"method_slug":"moco","method_name":"MoCo"},{"method_slug":"nt-xent","method_name":"NT-Xent"},{"method_slug":"random-gaussian-blur","method_name":"Random Gaussian Blur"},{"method_slug":"random-resized-crop","method_name":"Random Resized Crop"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"residual-block","method_name":"Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"simclr","method_name":"SimCLR"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2010.08508","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}