  While there has been progress in developing non-vacuous generalization bounds
for deep neural networks, these bounds tend to be uninformative about why deep
learning works. In this paper, we develop a compression approach based on
quantizing neural network parameters in a linear subspace, profoundly improving
on previous results to provide state-of-the-art generalization bounds on a
variety of tasks, including transfer learning. We use these tight bounds to
better understand the role of model size, equivariance, and the implicit biases
of optimization, for generalization in deep learning. Notably, we find large
models can be compressed to a much greater extent than previously known,
encapsulating Occam's razor. We also argue for data-independent bounds in
explaining generalization.
