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Related papers: PAC-Bayes Analysis Beyond the Usual Bounds

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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

This paper provides a general technique for lower bounding the Bayes risk of statistical estimation, applicable to arbitrary loss functions and arbitrary prior distributions. A lower bound on the Bayes risk not only serves as a lower bound…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-12-26 Xi Chen , Adityanand Guntuboyina , Yuchen Zhang

In statistical learning theory, a generalization bound usually involves a complexity measure imposed by the considered theoretical framework. This limits the scope of such bounds, as other forms of capacity measures or regularizations are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-22 Paul Viallard , Rémi Emonet , Amaury Habrard , Emilie Morvant , Valentina Zantedeschi

While PAC-Bayes is now an established learning framework for light-tailed losses (\emph{e.g.}, subgaussian or subexponential), its extension to the case of heavy-tailed losses remains largely uncharted and has attracted a growing interest…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-25 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 present two alternative ways to apply PAC-Bayesian analysis to sequences of dependent random variables. The first is based on a new lemma that enables to bound expectations of convex functions of certain dependent random variables by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-05-20 Yevgeny Seldin , François Laviolette , John Shawe-Taylor , Jan Peters , Peter Auer

We propose a general framework for studying adaptive regret bounds in the online learning framework, including model selection bounds and data-dependent bounds. Given a data- or model-dependent bound we ask, "Does there exist some algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , Karthik Sridharan

We introduce the problem of learning conditional averages in the PAC framework. The learner receives a sample labeled by an unknown target concept from a known concept class, as in standard PAC learning. However, instead of learning the…

The Fundamental Theorem of PAC Learning asserts that learnability of a concept class $H$ is equivalent to the $\textit{uniform convergence}$ of empirical error in $H$ to its mean, or equivalently, to the problem of $\textit{density…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Max Hopkins , Daniel M. Kane , Shachar Lovett , Gaurav Mahajan

We propose the first general PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for adversarial robustness, that estimate, at test time, how much a model will be invariant to imperceptible perturbations in the input. Instead of deriving a worst-case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Paul Viallard , Guillaume Vidot , Amaury Habrard , Emilie Morvant

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 present a family of novel block-sample MAC-Bayes bounds (mean approximately correct). While PAC-Bayes bounds (probably approximately correct) typically give bounds for the generalization error that hold with high probability, MAC-Bayes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Matthias Frey , Jingge Zhu , Michael C. Gastpar

We present a unifying picture of PAC-Bayesian and mutual information-based upper bounds on the generalization error of randomized learning algorithms. As we show, Tong Zhang's information exponential inequality (IEI) gives a general recipe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Pradeep Kr. Banerjee , Guido Montúfar

Symmetries are known to improve the empirical performance of machine learning models, yet theoretical guarantees explaining these gains remain limited. Prior work has focused mainly on compact group symmetries and often assumes that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Armin Beck , Peter Ochs

Application of deep neural networks to medical imaging tasks has in some sense become commonplace. Still, a "thorn in the side" of the deep learning movement is the argument that deep networks are prone to overfitting and are thus unable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-12 Anthony Sicilia , Xingchen Zhao , Anastasia Sosnovskikh , Seong Jae Hwang

We are motivated by the problem of providing strong generalization guarantees in the context of meta-learning. Existing generalization bounds are either challenging to evaluate or provide vacuous guarantees in even relatively simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Alec Farid , Anirudha Majumdar

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

Minimising upper bounds on the population risk or the generalisation gap has been widely used in structural risk minimisation (SRM) -- this is in particular at the core of PAC-Bayesian learning. Despite its successes and unfailing surge of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-30 Paul Viallard , Maxime Haddouche , Umut Şimşekli , Benjamin Guedj

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

Linear Autoencoders (LAEs) have shown strong performance in state-of-the-art recommender systems. However, this success remains largely empirical, with limited theoretical understanding. In this paper, we investigate the generalizability --…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-16 Ruixin Guo , Ruoming Jin , Xinyu Li , Yang Zhou