Unification and Optimization of Robust Supervised Learning

arXiv:2605.28165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robust learning methods such as distributionally robust optimization, vicinal risk minimization, Mixup, and label smoothing address different sources of uncertainty, including distribution shift, finite-sample effects, and label uncertainty. In practice, however, several such sources may occur simultaneously, and it remains unclear which robust method or combination of methods to use. We introduce a unified framework that organizes a broad class of robustness methods along explicit design axes and makes their relations and combinations explicit within a shared formulation. Within this framework, we analyze how robustness methods interact: some are redundant under particular modeling assumptions, whereas others yield genuinely distinct solution families, and these relationships can change with the model class or loss. We further derive a tractable training procedure that exposes the design choices and their strengths as tunable hyperparameters. Across vision and reward-modeling tasks, the preferred robustness method depends on the task, target metric, and validation data, while suitably selected combinations often outperform the best single method.