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We exhibit a strong link between frequentist PAC-Bayesian risk bounds and the Bayesian marginal likelihood. That is, for the negative log-likelihood loss function, we show that the minimization of PAC-Bayesian generalization risk bounds…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-14 Pascal Germain , Francis Bach , Alexandre Lacoste , Simon Lacoste-Julien

We establish disintegrated PAC-Bayesian generalisation bounds for models trained with gradient descent methods or continuous gradient flows. Contrary to standard practice in the PAC-Bayesian setting, our result applies to optimisation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-12 Eugenio Clerico , Tyler Farghly , George Deligiannidis , Benjamin Guedj , Arnaud Doucet

PAC-Bayes is a popular and efficient framework for obtaining generalization guarantees in situations involving uncountable hypothesis spaces. Unfortunately, in its classical formulation, it only provides guarantees on the expected risk of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Benjamin Leblanc , Pascal Germain

We derive explicit non-asymptotic PAC-Bayes generalization bounds for Gibbs posteriors, that is, data-dependent distributions over model parameters obtained by exponentially tilting a prior with the empirical risk. Unlike classical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-21 Chenyang Wang , Yun Yang

We present a new PAC-Bayesian generalization bound. Standard bounds contain a $\sqrt{L_n \cdot \KL/n}$ complexity term which dominates unless $L_n$, the empirical error of the learning algorithm's randomized predictions, vanishes. We manage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Zakaria Mhammedi , Peter D. Grunwald , Benjamin Guedj

We introduce a modified version of the excess risk, which can be used to obtain tighter, fast-rate PAC-Bayesian generalisation bounds. This modified excess risk leverages information about the relative hardness of data examples to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-25 Felix Biggs , Benjamin Guedj

We derive a novel PAC-Bayesian generalization bound for reinforcement learning that explicitly accounts for Markov dependencies in the data, through the chain's mixing time. This contributes to overcoming challenges in obtaining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Abdelkrim Zitouni , Mehdi Hennequin , Juba Agoun , Ryan Horache , Nadia Kabachi , Omar Rivasplata

Understanding the generalization behavior of deep neural networks remains a fundamental challenge in modern statistical learning theory. Among existing approaches, PAC-Bayesian norm-based bounds have demonstrated particular promise due to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-14 Xinping Yi , Gaojie Jin , Xiaowei Huang , Shi Jin

PAC-Bayes learning is an established framework to both assess the generalisation ability of learning algorithms, and design new learning algorithm by exploiting generalisation bounds as training objectives. Most of the exisiting bounds…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-31 Maxime Haddouche , Benjamin Guedj

In this paper, we derive a PAC-Bayes bound on the generalisation gap, in a supervised time-series setting for a special class of discrete-time non-linear dynamical systems. This class includes stable recurrent neural networks (RNN), and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-12 Deividas Eringis , John Leth , Zheng-Hua Tan , Rafal Wisniewski , Mihaly Petreczky

We derive PAC-Bayesian learning guarantees for heavy-tailed losses, and obtain a novel optimal Gibbs posterior which enjoys finite-sample excess risk bounds at logarithmic confidence. Our core technique itself makes use of PAC-Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-19 Matthew J. Holland

The limit of infinite width allows for substantial simplifications in the analytical study of over-parameterised neural networks. With a suitable random initialisation, an extremely large network exhibits an approximately Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-14 Eugenio Clerico , George Deligiannidis , Arnaud Doucet

Standard Bayesian learning is known to have suboptimal generalization capabilities under misspecification and in the presence of outliers. PAC-Bayes theory demonstrates that the free energy criterion minimized by Bayesian learning is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Matteo Zecchin , Sangwoo Park , Osvaldo Simeone , Marios Kountouris , David Gesbert

We propose an extensive analysis of the behavior of majority votes in binary classification. In particular, we introduce a risk bound for majority votes, called the C-bound, that takes into account the average quality of the voters and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-07-30 Pascal Germain , Alexandre Lacasse , François Laviolette , Mario Marchand , Jean-Francis Roy

When I first encountered PAC-Bayesian concentration inequalities they seemed to me to be rather disconnected from good old-fashioned results like Hoeffding's and Bernstein's inequalities. But, at least for one flavour of the PAC-Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-05-08 Tim van Erven

Meta-learning can successfully acquire useful inductive biases from data. Yet, its generalization properties to unseen learning tasks are poorly understood. Particularly if the number of meta-training tasks is small, this raises concerns…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-21 Jonas Rothfuss , Vincent Fortuin , Martin Josifoski , Andreas Krause

In this paper, we improve the PAC-Bayesian error bound for linear regression derived in Germain et al. [10]. The improvements are twofold. First, the proposed error bound is tighter, and converges to the generalization loss with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-09 Vera Shalaeva , Alireza Fakhrizadeh Esfahani , Pascal Germain , Mihaly Petreczky

Control policies from imitation learning can often fail to generalize to novel environments due to imperfect demonstrations or the inability of imitation learning algorithms to accurately infer the expert's policies. In this paper, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Allen Z. Ren , Sushant Veer , Anirudha Majumdar

In machine learning, Domain Adaptation (DA) arises when the distribution gen- erating the test (target) data differs from the one generating the learning (source) data. It is well known that DA is an hard task even under strong assumptions,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2012-12-12 Pascal Germain , Amaury Habrard , François Laviolette , Emilie Morvant

We consider the problem of predicting as well as the best linear combination of d given functions in least squares regression under L^\infty constraints on the linear combination. When the input distribution is known, there already exists…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2011-09-14 Jean-Yves Audibert , Olivier Catoni