Related papers: Learning via Surrogate PAC-Bayes
Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) is a family of "coherent risk measures" which generalize the traditional mathematical expectation. Widely used in mathematical finance, it is garnering increasing interest in machine learning, e.g., as an…
Understanding the generalization behavior of deep neural networks remains a fundamental challenge in modern statistical learning theory. Among existing approaches, PAC-Bayesian norm-based bounds have demonstrated particular promise due to…
In this paper, we investigate the question: Given a small number of datapoints, for example N = 30, how tight can PAC-Bayes and test set bounds be made? For such small datasets, test set bounds adversely affect generalisation performance by…
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 --…
Actor-critic algorithms address the dual goals of reinforcement learning (RL), policy evaluation and improvement via two separate function approximators. The practicality of this approach comes at the expense of training instability, caused…
Bayesian optimization (BO) methods often rely on the assumption that the objective function is well-behaved, but in practice, this is seldom true for real-world objectives even if noise-free observations can be collected. Common approaches,…
Many control problems require repeated tuning and adaptation of controllers across distinct closed-loop tasks, where data efficiency and adaptability are critical. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian optimization (BO) framework that is…
Fast machine learning-based surrogate models are trained to emulate slow, high-fidelity engineering simulation models to accelerate engineering design tasks. This introduces uncertainty as the surrogate is only an approximation of the…
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…
The limit of infinite width allows for substantial simplifications in the analytical study of over-parameterised neural networks. With a suitable random initialisation, an extremely large network exhibits an approximately Gaussian…
When utilising PAC-Bayes theory for risk certification, it is usually necessary to estimate and bound the Gibbs risk of the PAC-Bayes posterior. Many works in the literature employ a method for this which requires a large number of passes…
Learning to rank is a supervised learning problem where the output space is the space of rankings but the supervision space is the space of relevance scores. We make theoretical contributions to the learning to rank problem both in the…
Given a prediction task, understanding when one can and cannot design a consistent convex surrogate loss, particularly a low-dimensional one, is an important and active area of machine learning research. The prediction task may be given as…
Learning controller parameters from closed-loop data has been shown to improve closed-loop performance. Bayesian optimization, a widely used black-box and sample-efficient learning method, constructs a probabilistic surrogate of the…
Bayesian priors offer a compact yet general means of incorporating domain knowledge into many learning tasks. The correctness of the Bayesian analysis and inference, however, largely depends on accuracy and correctness of these priors.…
The exploration of novel architectures requires physics-based simulation due to a lack of prior experience to start from, which introduces two specific challenges for optimization algorithms: evaluations become more expensive (in time) and…
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'…
We consider the problem of offline black-box optimization, where the goal is to discover optimal designs (e.g., molecules or materials) from past experimental data. A key challenge in this setting is data scarcity: in many scientific…
Complex robot navigation and control problems can be framed as policy search problems. However, interactive learning in uncertain environments can be expensive, requiring the use of data-efficient methods. Bayesian optimization is an…
We build a theoretical framework for designing and understanding practical meta-learning methods that integrates sophisticated formalizations of task-similarity with the extensive literature on online convex optimization and sequential…