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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 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

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

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

The predict-then-optimize paradigm bridges online learning and contextual optimization in dynamic environments. Previous works have investigated the sequential updating of predictors using feedback from downstream decisions to minimize…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-26 Zhuojun Xie , Adam Abdin , Yiping Fang

This paper presents an approach for learning vision-based planners that provably generalize to novel environments (i.e., environments unseen during training). We leverage the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC)-Bayes framework to obtain an…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-11 Sushant Veer , Anirudha Majumdar

In the PAC-Bayesian literature, the C-Bound refers to an insightful relation between the risk of a majority vote classifier (under the zero-one loss) and the first two moments of its margin (i.e., the expected margin and the voters'…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-01 Paul Viallard , Pascal Germain , Amaury Habrard , Emilie Morvant

Transfer learning has received a lot of attention in the machine learning community over the last years, and several effective algorithms have been developed. However, relatively little is known about their theoretical properties,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-05-13 Anastasia Pentina , Christoph H. Lampert

Empirically, the PAC-Bayesian analysis is known to produce tight risk bounds for practical machine learning algorithms. However, in its naive form, it can only deal with stochastic predictors while such predictors are rarely used and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-22 Kohei Miyaguchi

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

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

A learning method is self-certified if it uses all available data to simultaneously learn a predictor and certify its quality with a tight statistical certificate that is valid on unseen data. Recent work has shown that neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-13 Maria Perez-Ortiz , Omar Rivasplata , Emilio Parrado-Hernandez , Benjamin Guedj , John Shawe-Taylor

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

This paper introduces a new principled approach for off-policy learning in contextual bandits. Unlike previous work, our approach does not derive learning principles from intractable or loose bounds. We analyse the problem through the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-30 Otmane Sakhi , Pierre Alquier , Nicolas Chopin

This paper presents a PAC-Bayes framework for learning controllers for unknown stochastic linear discrete-time systems, where the system parameters are drawn from a fixed but unknown distribution. We derive a data-dependent high probability…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-22 Yujia Luo , Ye Pu , Jonathan H. Manton , Jingge Zhu

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

A fundamental question in theoretical machine learning is generalization. Over the past decades, the PAC-Bayesian approach has been established as a flexible framework to address the generalization capabilities of machine learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Fredrik Hellström , Giuseppe Durisi , Benjamin Guedj , Maxim Raginsky

Identifying optimal values for a high-dimensional set of hyperparameters is a problem that has received growing attention given its importance to large-scale machine learning applications such as neural architecture search. Recently…

Machine unlearning refers to mechanisms that can remove the influence of a subset of training data upon request from a trained model without incurring the cost of re-training from scratch. This paper develops a unified PAC-Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-02 Sharu Theresa Jose , Osvaldo Simeone

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