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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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.030
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.146
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.030
Threshold uncertainty score0.159

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0300.146
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0050.002
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0040.003
Bibliometrics0.0040.002
Science and technology studies0.0020.009
Scholarly communication0.0060.016
Open science0.0050.012
Research integrity0.0050.017
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.002

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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
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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