Supervised Learning Has a Necessary Geometric Blind Spot: Theory, Consequences, and Minimal Repair

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21395v2
• Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:44:51 GMT
• Title: Supervised Learning Has a Necessary Geometric Blind Spot: Theory, Consequences, and Minimal Repair
• Abstract summary: We show that any encoder minimizing supervised loss must retain non-zero sensitivity along directions correlated with training labels.<n>We call this the geometric blind spot of supervised learning.
• Score: 0.5854803320592717
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: PGD adversarial training, the standard robustness method, can reduce Jacobian Frobenius norm yet worsen clean-input geometry (e.g., TDI 1.336 vs. ERM 1.093). We show this is not an implementation artifact but a theorem-level consequence of supervised learning. We prove that any encoder minimizing supervised loss must retain non-zero sensitivity along directions correlated with training labels, including directions that are nuisance at test time. This holds across proper scoring rules, architectures, and dataset sizes. We call this the geometric blind spot of supervised learning. This theorem unifies four empirical phenomena often treated separately: non-robust features, texture bias, corruption fragility, and the robustness-accuracy tradeoff. It also explains why suppressing sensitivity in one adversarial direction can redistribute sensitivity elsewhere. We introduce Trajectory Deviation Index (TDI), a diagnostic of geometric isotropy. Unlike CKA, intrinsic dimension, or Jacobian Frobenius norm alone, TDI captures the failure mode above. In our experiments, PGD attains low Frobenius norm but high TDI, while PMH attains the lowest TDI with one additional training term and no architectural changes. Across seven tasks, BERT/SST-2, and ImageNet ViT-B/16 (backbone family underlying CLIP/DINO/SAM), the blind spot is measurable and repairable. It appears at foundation-model scale, worsens with model scale and task-specific fine-tuning, and is substantially reduced by PMH. PMH also leads on non-Gaussian corruption types (blur/brightness/contrast) without corruption-specific training.

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