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Related papers: On Margins and Derandomisation in PAC-Bayes

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We study the problem of PAC learning one-hidden-layer ReLU networks with $k$ hidden units on $\mathbb{R}^d$ under Gaussian marginals in the presence of additive label noise. For the case of positive coefficients, we give the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Vasilis Kontonis , Nikos Zarifis

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

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

In this paper we establish a new margin-based generalization bound for voting classifiers, refining existing results and yielding tighter generalization guarantees for widely used boosting algorithms such as AdaBoost (Freund and Schapire,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Mikael Møller Høgsgaard , Kasper Green Larsen

This paper generalizes an important result from the PAC-Bayesian literature for binary classification to the case of ensemble methods for structured outputs. We prove a generic version of the \Cbound, an upper bound over the risk of models…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-16 François Laviolette , Emilie Morvant , Liva Ralaivola , Jean-Francis 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

This tutorial gives a concise overview of existing PAC-Bayesian theory focusing on three generalization bounds. The first is an Occam bound which handles rules with finite precision parameters and which states that generalization loss is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-07-09 David McAllester

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 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

We use the PAC-Bayesian theory for the setting of learning-to-optimize. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first framework to learn optimization algorithms with provable generalization guarantees (PAC-Bayesian bounds) and explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Michael Sucker , Jalal Fadili , Peter Ochs

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

The PAC-Bayesian framework has significantly advanced the understanding of statistical learning, particularly for majority voting methods. Despite its successes, its application to multi-view learning -- a setting with multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Mehdi Hennequin , Abdelkrim Zitouni , Khalid Benabdeslem , Haytham Elghazel , Yacine Gaci

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

Classical PAC generalization bounds on the prediction risk of a classifier are insufficient to provide theoretical guarantees on fairness when the goal is to learn models balancing predictive risk and fairness constraints. We propose a…

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

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

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

We focus on a stochastic learning model where the learner observes a finite set of training examples and the output of the learning process is a data-dependent distribution over a space of hypotheses. The learned data-dependent distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-29 Omar Rivasplata , Ilja Kuzborskij , Csaba Szepesvari , John Shawe-Taylor

We give tight concentration bounds for mixtures of martingales that are simultaneously uniform over (a) mixture distributions, in a PAC-Bayes sense; and (b) all finite times. These bounds are proved in terms of the martingale variance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-06-23 Akshay Balsubramani

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