English

PAC-Bayes and Domain Adaptation

Machine Learning 2019-11-19 v3

Abstract

We provide two main contributions in PAC-Bayesian theory for domain adaptation where the objective is to learn, from a source distribution, a well-performing majority vote on a different, but related, target distribution. Firstly, we propose an improvement of the previous approach we proposed in Germain et al. (2013), which relies on a novel distribution pseudodistance based on a disagreement averaging, allowing us to derive a new tighter domain adaptation bound for the target risk. While this bound stands in the spirit of common domain adaptation works, we derive a second bound (introduced in Germain et al., 2016) that brings a new perspective on domain adaptation by deriving an upper bound on the target risk where the distributions' divergence-expressed as a ratio-controls the trade-off between a source error measure and the target voters' disagreement. We discuss and compare both results, from which we obtain PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds. Furthermore, from the PAC-Bayesian specialization to linear classifiers, we infer two learning algorithms, and we evaluate them on real data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1707.05712,
  title  = {PAC-Bayes and Domain Adaptation},
  author = {Pascal Germain and Amaury Habrard and François Laviolette and Emilie Morvant},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.05712},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Neurocomputing, Elsevier, 2019. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1503.06944

R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:50:33.618Z