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Record W7117079369

Towards Sharp Minimax Risk Bounds for Operator Learning

2025· article· W7117079369 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Ben Adcock, Rahul Parhi

Bibliographic record

VenueArXiv.org · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldMathematics
TopicStatistical Methods and Inference
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaHausdorff Center for MathematicsDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
KeywordsMinimaxLipschitz continuityCovariance operatorOperator (biology)Spectrum (functional analysis)Upper and lower boundsBounded functionCovarianceMeasure (data warehouse)
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

We develop a minimax theory for operator learning, where the goal is to estimate an unknown operator between separable Hilbert spaces from finitely many noisy input-output samples. For uniformly bounded Lipschitz operators, we prove information-theoretic lower bounds together with matching or near-matching upper bounds, covering both fixed and random designs under Hilbert-valued Gaussian noise and Gaussian white noise errors. The rates are controlled by the spectrum of the covariance operator of the measure that defines the error metric. Our setup is very general and allows for measures with unbounded support. A key implication is a curse of sample complexity, which shows that the minimax risk for generic Lipschitz operators cannot decay at any algebraic rate in the sample size. We obtain sharp characterizations when the covariance spectrum decays exponentially and provide general upper and lower bounds in slower-decay regimes. Finally, we show that assuming higher regularity, i.e., Hölder smoothness, does not improve minimax rates over the Lipschitz case, up to potential constants. Thus, we show that learning operators of any finite regularity necessarily suffers a curse of sample complexity.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.029
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Meta-epidemiology (narrow), Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.279
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.029
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.101
GPT teacher head0.400
Teacher spread0.299 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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