Quantifying Learning Guarantees for Convex but Inconsistent Surrogates
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study consistency properties of machine learning methods based on minimizing convex surrogates. We extend the recent framework of Osokin et al. (2017) for the quantitative analysis of consistency properties to the case of inconsistent surrogates. Our key technical contribution consists in a new lower bound on the calibration function for the quadratic surrogate, which is non-trivial (not always zero) for inconsistent cases. The new bound allows to quantify the level of inconsistency of the setting and shows how learning with inconsistent surrogates can have guarantees on sample complexity and optimization difficulty. We apply our theory to two concrete cases: multi-class classification with the tree-structured loss and ranking with the mean average precision loss. The results show the approximation-computation trade-offs caused by inconsistent surrogates and their potential benefits.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it