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We introduce a new notion of complexity of functions and we show that it has the following properties: (i) it governs a PAC Bayes-like generalization bound, (ii) for neural networks it relates to natural notions of complexity of functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Grzegorz Głuch , Rudiger Urbanke

"No free lunch" results state the impossibility of obtaining meaningful bounds on the error of a learning algorithm without prior assumptions and modelling. Some models are expensive (strong assumptions, such as as subgaussian tails),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Benjamin Guedj , Louis Pujol

Our goal is to learn control policies for robots that provably generalize well to novel environments given a dataset of example environments. The key technical idea behind our approach is to leverage tools from generalization theory in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-08-27 Anirudha Majumdar , Alec Farid , Anoopkumar Sonar

We introduce a new PAC-Bayes oracle bound for unbounded losses that extends Cram\'er-Chernoff bounds to the PAC-Bayesian setting. The proof technique relies on controlling the tails of certain random variables involving the Cram\'er…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-31 Ioar Casado , Luis A. Ortega , Aritz Pérez , Andrés R. Masegosa

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

PAC-Bayes learning is a comprehensive setting for (i) studying the generalisation ability of learning algorithms and (ii) deriving new learning algorithms by optimising a generalisation bound. However, optimising generalisation bounds might…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-27 Antoine Picard-Weibel , Roman Moscoviz , Benjamin Guedj

This paper builds on recent research that focuses on regression modeling of continuous bounded data, such as proportions measured on a continuous scale. Specifically, it deals with beta regression models with mixed effects from a Bayesian…

The Bayesian posterior minimizes the "inferential risk" which itself bounds the "predictive risk". This bound is tight when the likelihood and prior are well-specified. However since misspecification induces a gap, the Bayesian posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Warren R. Morningstar , Alexander A. Alemi , Joshua V. Dillon

This paper is focused on dimension-free PAC-Bayesian bounds, under weak polynomial moment assumptions, allowing for heavy tailed sample distributions. It covers the estimation of the mean of a vector or a matrix, with applications to least…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-01-03 Olivier Catoni , Ilaria Giulini

PAC-Bayesian analysis is a frequentist framework for incorporating prior knowledge into learning. It was inspired by Bayesian learning, which allows sequential data processing and naturally turns posteriors from one processing step into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Yi-Shan Wu , Yijie Zhang , Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif , Yevgeny Seldin

Since their inception, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have become central in machine learning. Despite their widespread use, numerous questions regarding their theoretical properties remain open. Using PAC-Bayesian theory, this work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Sokhna Diarra Mbacke , Florence Clerc , Pascal Germain

This paper studies the problem of learning clusters which are consistently present in different (continuously valued) representations of observed data. Our setup differs slightly from the standard approach of (co-) clustering as we use the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2010-09-21 David R. Hardoon , Kristiaan Pelcksman

While there has been progress in developing non-vacuous generalization bounds for deep neural networks, these bounds tend to be uninformative about why deep learning works. In this paper, we develop a compression approach based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Sanae Lotfi , Marc Finzi , Sanyam Kapoor , Andres Potapczynski , Micah Goldblum , Andrew Gordon Wilson

The developments of Rademacher complexity and PAC-Bayesian theory have been largely independent. One exception is the PAC-Bayes theorem of Kakade, Sridharan, and Tewari (2008), which is established via Rademacher complexity theory by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Jun Yang , Shengyang Sun , Daniel M. Roy

Considering a probability distribution over parameters is known as an efficient strategy to learn a neural network with non-differentiable activation functions. We study the expectation of a probabilistic neural network as a predictor by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-17 Louis Fortier-Dubois , Gaël Letarte , Benjamin Leblanc , François Laviolette , Pascal Germain

PAC generalization bounds on the risk, when expressed in terms of the expected loss, are often insufficient to capture imbalances between subgroups in the data. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a new family of risk measures, called…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-09 Hind Atbir , Farah Cherfaoui , Guillaume Metzler , Emilie Morvant , Paul Viallard

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

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 prove general exponential moment inequalities for averages of [0,1]-valued iid random variables and use them to tighten the PAC Bayesian Theorem. The logarithmic dependence on the sample count in the enumerator of the PAC Bayesian bound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Andreas Maurer

We present a distributionally robust PAC-Bayesian framework for certifying the performance of learning-based finite-horizon controllers. While existing PAC-Bayes control literature typically assumes bounded losses and matching training and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Domagoj Herceg , Duarte Antunes