English

Differentiable PAC-Bayes Objectives with Partially Aggregated Neural Networks

Machine Learning 2021-12-16 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

We make three related contributions motivated by the challenge of training stochastic neural networks, particularly in a PAC-Bayesian setting: (1) we show how averaging over an ensemble of stochastic neural networks enables a new class of \emph{partially-aggregated} estimators; (2) we show that these lead to provably lower-variance gradient estimates for non-differentiable signed-output networks; (3) we reformulate a PAC-Bayesian bound for these networks to derive a directly optimisable, differentiable objective and a generalisation guarantee, without using a surrogate loss or loosening the bound. This bound is twice as tight as that of Letarte et al. (2019) on a similar network type. We show empirically that these innovations make training easier and lead to competitive guarantees.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.12228,
  title  = {Differentiable PAC-Bayes Objectives with Partially Aggregated Neural Networks},
  author = {Felix Biggs and Benjamin Guedj},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.12228},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:31:08.979Z