arXiv:2509.20618v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study gapped scale-sensitive dimensions of a function class in both sequential and non-sequential settings. We demonstrate that covering numbers for any uniformly bounded class are controlled above by these gapped dimensions, generalizing the results of cite{anthony2000function,alon1997scale}. Moreover, we show that the gapped dimensions lead to lower bounds on offset Rademacher averages, thereby strengthening existing approaches for proving lower bounds on rates of convergence in statistical and online learning.