Information-Theoretic Generalization Bounds for Transductive Learning and its Applications

We develop generalization bounds for transductive learning algorithms in the context of information theory and PAC-Bayesian theory, covering both the random sampling setting and the random splitting setting. We show that the transductive generalization gap can be bounded by the mutual information between training labels selection and the hypothesis. By introducing the concept of transductive supersamples, we translate results depicted by various information measures from the inductive learning setting to the transductive learning setting. We further establish PAC-Bayesian bounds with weaker assumptions on the loss function and numbers of training and test data points. Finally, we present the upper bounds for adaptive optimization algorithms and demonstrate the applications of results on semi-supervised learning and graph learning scenarios. Our theoretic results are validated on both synthetic and real-world datasets.