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Related papers: Generalization Bounds for Meta-Learning via PAC-Ba…

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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

In meta-learning an agent extracts knowledge from observed tasks, aiming to facilitate learning of novel future tasks. Under the assumption that future tasks are 'related' to previous tasks, the accumulated knowledge should be learned in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-21 Ron Amit , Ron Meir

Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) bounds are widely used to derive probabilistic guarantees for the generalisation of machine learning models. They highlight the components of the model which contribute to its generalisation capacity.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Thomas Walker , Alessio Lomuscio

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Felix Biggs , Benjamin Guedj

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

PAC-Bayesian is an analysis framework where the training error can be expressed as the weighted average of the hypotheses in the posterior distribution whilst incorporating the prior knowledge. In addition to being a pure generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-07 Wei Huang , Chunrui Liu , Yilan Chen , Tianyu Liu , Richard Yi Da Xu

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

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

Both PAC-Bayesian and Sample Compress learning frameworks are instrumental for deriving tight (non-vacuous) generalization bounds for neural networks. We leverage these results in a meta-learning scheme, relying on a hypernetwork that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Benjamin Leblanc , Mathieu Bazinet , Nathaniel D'Amours , Alexandre Drouin , Pascal Germain

In this work, we propose a PAC-Bayes bound for the generalization risk of the Gibbs classifier in the multi-class classification framework. The novelty of our work is the critical use of the confusion matrix of a classifier as an error…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-10-23 Emilie Morvant , Sokol Koço , Liva Ralaivola

Generalization error (also known as the out-of-sample error) measures how well the hypothesis learned from training data generalizes to previously unseen data. Proving tight generalization error bounds is a central question in statistical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Jian Li , Xuanyuan Luo , Mingda Qiao

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

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

Variational inference (VI) is widely used for approximate inference in Bayesian machine learning. In addition to this practical success, generalization bounds for variational inference and related algorithms have been developed, mostly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Yadi Wei , Roni Khardon

The ability of overparameterized deep networks to generalize well has been linked to the fact that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) finds solutions that lie in flat, wide minima in the training loss -- minima where the output of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Vaishnavh Nagarajan , J. Zico Kolter

In the Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) setting, a prior distribution over the unknown problem parameters -- the rewards and transitions -- is assumed, and a policy that optimizes the (posterior) expected return is sought. A common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Aviv Tamar , Daniel Soudry , Ev Zisselman

We study the generalization error of randomized learning algorithms -- focusing on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) -- using a novel combination of PAC-Bayes and algorithmic stability. Importantly, our generalization bounds hold for all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Ben London

One of the main theoretical challenges in learning dynamical systems from data is providing upper bounds on the generalization error, that is, the difference between the expected prediction error and the empirical prediction error measured…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Daniel Racz , Martin Gonzalez , Mihaly Petreczky , Andras Benczur , Balint Daroczy

A central challenge in understanding generalization is to obtain non-vacuous guarantees that go beyond worst-case complexity over data or weight space. Among existing approaches, PAC-Bayes bounds stand out as they can provide tight,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-01 Damien Rouchouse , Antoine Gonon , Rémi Gribonval , Benjamin Guedj

Deep neural networks generalize well despite being heavily overparameterized, in apparent contradiction with classical learning theory based on uniform convergence over fixed hypothesis spaces. Uniform bounds over the entire parameter space…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-15 Hubert Leroux , Jean Marcus , Julien Roger