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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

The principal contribution of this paper is a conceptual framework for off-policy reinforcement learning, based on conditional expectations of importance sampling ratios. This framework yields new perspectives and understanding of existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-31 Mark Rowland , Anna Harutyunyan , Hado van Hasselt , Diana Borsa , Tom Schaul , Rémi Munos , Will Dabney

Personalized preference alignment for LLMs with diverse human preferences requires evaluation and alignment methods that capture pluralism. Most existing preference alignment datasets are logged under policies that differ substantially from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Chengkai Huang , Junda Wu , Zhouhang Xie , Yu Xia , Rui Wang , Tong Yu , Subrata Mitra , Julian McAuley , Lina Yao

In reinforcement learning, the classic objectives of maximizing discounted and finite-horizon cumulative rewards are PAC-learnable: There are algorithms that learn a near-optimal policy with high probability using a finite amount of samples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Cambridge Yang , Michael Littman , Michael Carbin

We study the issue of PAC-Bayesian domain adaptation: We want to learn, from a source domain, a majority vote model dedicated to a target one. Our theoretical contribution brings a new perspective by deriving an upper-bound on the target…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-07-27 Pascal Germain , Amaury Habrard , François Laviolette , Emilie Morvant

Continuous and efficient experimentation is key to the practical success of user-facing applications on the web, both through online A/B-tests and off-policy evaluation. Despite their shared objective -- estimating the incremental value of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Olivier Jeunen

Online interactions with the environment to collect data samples for training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent is not always feasible due to economic and safety concerns. The goal of Offline Reinforcement Learning is to address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Chi Zhang , Sanmukh Rao Kuppannagari , Viktor K Prasanna

We investigate a stochastic counterpart of majority votes over finite ensembles of classifiers, and study its generalization properties. While our approach holds for arbitrary distributions, we instantiate it with Dirichlet distributions:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Valentina Zantedeschi , Paul Viallard , Emilie Morvant , Rémi Emonet , Amaury Habrard , Pascal Germain , Benjamin Guedj

We consider a personalized pricing problem in which we have data consisting of feature information, historical pricing decisions, and binary realized demand. The goal is to perform off-policy evaluation for a new personalized pricing policy…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-27 Adam N. Elmachtoub , Vishal Gupta , Yunfan Zhao

In this paper, we present refined probabilistic bounds on empirical reward estimates for off-policy learning in bandit problems. We build on the PAC-Bayesian bounds from Seldin et al. (2010) and improve on their results using a new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-18 Amaury Gouverneur , Tobias J. Oechtering , Mikael Skoglund

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) faces distributional shift and unreliable value estimation, especially for out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. To address this, existing uncertainty-based methods penalize the value function with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Xudong Yu , Chenjia Bai , Hongyi Guo , Changhong Wang , Zhen Wang

Self-paced learning (SPL) mimics the cognitive mechanism of humans and animals that gradually learns from easy to hard samples. One key issue in SPL is to obtain better weighting strategy that is determined by minimizer function. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-20 Yanbo Fan , Ran He , Jian Liang , Bao-Gang Hu

We consider a weakly supervised learning problem called Learning from Label Proportions (LLP), where examples are grouped into ``bags'' and only the average label within each bag is revealed to the learner. We study various learning rules…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Gene Li , Lin Chen , Adel Javanmard , Vahab Mirrokni

Offline policy evaluation (OPE) is considered a fundamental and challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). This paper focuses on the value estimation of a target policy based on pre-collected data generated from a possibly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

We introduce a new neural network-based continual learning algorithm, dubbed as Uncertainty-regularized Continual Learning (UCL), which builds on traditional Bayesian online learning framework with variational inference. We focus on two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Hongjoon Ahn , Sungmin Cha , Donggyu Lee , Taesup Moon

We present a probabilistic model for stochastic iterative algorithms with the use case of optimization algorithms in mind. Based on this model, we present PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for functions that are defined on the trajectory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Michael Sucker , Peter Ochs

Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Jiachen Li , Shuo Cheng , Zhenyu Liao , Huayan Wang , William Yang Wang , Qinxun Bai

In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Jie Wang , Rui Gao , Hongyuan Zha

This paper explores Bayesian estimation for categorical data, focusing on simple yet effective models that provide a foundation for applying more advanced methods accurately and reliably in real-world applications. We begin by revisiting…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-03 Jan Kalina

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