Gradient Methods Never Overfit On Separable Data

Abstract

A line of recent works established that when training linear predictors over separable data, using gradient methods and exponentially-tailed losses, the predictors asymptotically converge in direction to the max-margin predictor. As a consequence, the predictors asymptotically do not overfit. However, this does not address the question of whether overfitting might occur non-asymptotically, after some bounded number of iterations. In this paper, we formally show that standard gradient methods (in particular, gradient flow, gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent) never overfit on separable data: If we run these methods for $T$ iterations on a dataset of size $m$, both the empirical risk and the generalization error decrease at an essentially optimal rate of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/γ^2 T)$ up till $T\approx m$, at which point the generalization error remains fixed at an essentially optimal level of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/γ^2 m)$ regardless of how large $T$ is. Along the way, we present non-asymptotic bounds on the number of margin violations over the dataset, and prove their tightness.