Generalization Bounds for Autoregressive Processes and In-Context Learning

2025-10-22

PriGM@EurIPS 2025Workshop on Principles of Generative Modeling

Generalization Bounds for Autoregressive Processes and In-Context Learning

Oğuz Kaan Yüksel·Nicolas Flammarion
October 2025

Research context

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Produces

Research objectGeneralization bound

Out-of-domain generalization from rephrasability and stability

Rephrasability of the data-generating process and stability of the predictor class jointly control the gap between in-domain denoising and prediction on unseen domains. For unbounded autoregressive processes, this gives an out-of-domain generalization guarantee at a token-level rate.

Statement
\[\sup_{\theta\in\Theta_K}\left|L_{\mathrm{out}}(\theta)-L_{\mathrm{in}}(\theta)\right|\leq\widetilde{\mathcal O}\!\left(\rho\sqrt{\frac{C(\varepsilon)}{NT}}\right)\]
\(N\)
number of independent sequences
\(T\)
number of predicted tokens per sequence
\(C(\varepsilon)\)
sequential metric entropy at resolution \(\varepsilon\)
\(\rho\)
effective dependence scale determined by the rephrasability condition
\(\Theta_K\)
stable hypothesis class
\(\widetilde{\mathcal O}\)
asymptotic upper-bound notation suppressing logarithmic factors in the other problem parameters and confidence level
\(L_{\mathrm{in}}\)
in-sample denoising error
\(L_{\mathrm{out}}\)
out-of-domain prediction error