尺度敏感粉碎:最优尺度下的可学习性与可评估性 / Scale-Sensitive Shattering: Learnability and Evaluability at Optimal Scale
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文证明了在实值函数类学习中,均匀收敛、可学习和fat-shattering维数在最优尺度上是等价的,将之前需要两倍因子松弛的上界提升到精确匹配,并以此解决了积分概率度量评估中的关键问题——任何此类度量要么可以精确估计,要么最多只能近似到三倍精度。
We study the optimal scale at which real-valued function classes exhibit uniform convergence and learnability. Our main result establishes a scale-sensitive generalization of the fundamental theorem of PAC learning: for every bounded real-valued class and every $\gamma>0$, uniform convergence at scale $\gamma$, agnostic learnability at scale $\gamma/2$, and finiteness of the fat-shattering dimension at every scale $\gamma'>\gamma$ are equivalent. This resolves a question by Anthony and Bartlett (Cambridge Univ. Press 1999) on the precise scales governing learnability, refuting a conjecture attributed there to Phil Long that a multiplicative 2-factor gap is unavoidable, and improves the upper bounds of Bartlett and Long (JCSS 1998), which incur such a loss. The key technical ingredient is a direct bound on empirical $\ell_\infty$ covering numbers, avoiding the standard detour through packing numbers. As a consequence, we obtain sharp asymptotic metric-entropy bounds in terms of the fat-shattering scale $\gamma$: an $O(\log^2 n)$ bound holds already at scale $\gamma/2$, while an $O(\log n)$ bound holds at scale $2\gamma$. We further show that the $O(\log^2 n)$ bound is sometimes tight. These results resolve open questions by Alon et al. (JACM 1997) and Rudelson and Vershynin (Ann. of Math. 2006). As an application, we establish a sharp dichotomy for bounded integral probability metrics: every such IPM is either estimable or cannot be weakly evaluated within any multiplicative factor $c<3$, while $3$-weak evaluability always holds, resolving an open question from Aiyer et al. (ICML 2026). We also highlight several open questions on quantitative sample complexity and evaluability.
尺度敏感粉碎:最优尺度下的可学习性与可评估性 / Scale-Sensitive Shattering: Learnability and Evaluability at Optimal Scale
本文证明了在实值函数类学习中,均匀收敛、可学习和fat-shattering维数在最优尺度上是等价的,将之前需要两倍因子松弛的上界提升到精确匹配,并以此解决了积分概率度量评估中的关键问题——任何此类度量要么可以精确估计,要么最多只能近似到三倍精度。
源自 arXiv: 2605.13684