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Non-Vacuous Generalization Bounds for Large Language Models

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arxiv 2312.17173 v3 pith:DGQRJXMA submitted 2023-12-28 stat.ML cs.LG

Non-Vacuous Generalization Bounds for Large Language Models

classification stat.ML cs.LG
keywords modelsboundsgeneralizationlanguagenon-vacuousboundcompressiondata
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Modern language models can contain billions of parameters, raising the question of whether they can generalize beyond the training data or simply parrot their training corpora. We provide the first non-vacuous generalization bounds for pretrained large language models (LLMs), indicating that language models are capable of discovering regularities that generalize to unseen data. In particular, we derive a compression bound that is valid for the unbounded log-likelihood loss using prediction smoothing, and we extend the bound to handle subsampling, accelerating bound computation by orders of magnitude on massive datasets. To achieve the extreme level of compression required for non-vacuous bounds, we devise SubLoRA, a simple low-dimensional nonlinear parameterization that leads to non-vacuous generalization bounds for models with nearly a billion parameters. Finally, we use our bounds to understand LLM generalization and find that larger models have better generalization bounds and are more compressible than smaller models.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Non-vacuous Generalization Bounds for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

    cs.LG 2026-07 reject novelty 6.0

    Non-vacuous PAC-Bayes generalization bounds for billion-parameter RLVR models, obtained by a Gumbel-max reparameterization and aggressive TinyLoRA distillation/quantization, are claimed for four tasks.

  2. Inductive Generalization for Robotic Manipulation

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    The paper introduces an inductive generalization evaluation protocol for manipulation policies and shows that SOTA vision-language-action models fail on progressively harder task variants.

  3. Customizing the Inductive Biases of Softmax Attention using Structured Matrices

    cs.LG 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0

    Structured-matrix scoring functions, BTT and MLR, let attention escape the low-rank bottleneck and add a distance-dependent compute bias, improving accuracy for fixed compute on regression, language modeling, and forecasting.

  4. Large Language Model Agent: A Survey on Methodology, Applications and Challenges

    cs.CL 2025-03 accept novelty 3.0

    A survey that deconstructs LLM agent systems via a methodology-centered taxonomy linking design principles to emergent behaviors, applications, and challenges.