English
Related papers

Related papers: How good is PAC-Bayes at explaining generalisation…

200 papers

We present new PAC-Bayesian generalisation bounds for learning problems with unbounded loss functions. This extends the relevance and applicability of the PAC-Bayes learning framework, where most of the existing literature focuses on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-16 Maxime Haddouche , Benjamin Guedj , Omar Rivasplata , John Shawe-Taylor

Existing guarantees in terms of rigorous upper bounds on the generalization error for the original random forest algorithm, one of the most frequently used machine learning methods, are unsatisfying. We discuss and evaluate various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-07 Stephan Sloth Lorenzen , Christian Igel , Yevgeny Seldin

We investigate the in-distribution generalization of machine learning algorithms. We depart from traditional complexity-based approaches by analyzing information-theoretic bounds that quantify the dependence between a learning algorithm and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-27 Borja Rodríguez-Gálvez , Ragnar Thobaben , Mikael Skoglund

We introduce a new framework for studying meta-learning methods using PAC-Bayesian theory. Its main advantage over previous work is that it allows for more flexibility in how the transfer of knowledge between tasks is realized. For previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Hossein Zakerinia , Amin Behjati , Christoph H. Lampert

We provide two main contributions in PAC-Bayesian theory for domain adaptation where the objective is to learn, from a source distribution, a well-performing majority vote on a different, but related, target distribution. Firstly, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-19 Pascal Germain , Amaury Habrard , François Laviolette , Emilie Morvant

Despite its wide use and empirical successes, the theoretical understanding and study of the behaviour and performance of the variational autoencoder (VAE) have only emerged in the past few years. We contribute to this recent line of work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif , Yuyang Shi , Arnaud Doucet , Benjamin Guedj

We propose the first general PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for adversarial robustness, that estimate, at test time, how much a model will be invariant to imperceptible perturbations in the input. Instead of deriving a worst-case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Paul Viallard , Guillaume Vidot , Amaury Habrard , Emilie Morvant

Abstract We present PAC-Bayesian bounds for the generalisation error of the K-nearest-neighbour classifier (K-NN). This is achieved by casting the K-NN classifier into a kernel space framework in the limit of vanishing kernel bandwidth. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Thore Graepel , Ralf Herbrich

Modern machine learning usually involves predictors in the overparameterised setting (number of trained parameters greater than dataset size), and their training yields not only good performance on training data, but also good…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-12 Maxime Haddouche , Paul Viallard , Umut Simsekli , Benjamin Guedj

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 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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-14 Andrew Y. K. Foong , Wessel P. Bruinsma , David R. Burt , Richard E. Turner

Large reasoning models have shown strong performance through extended chain-of-thought reasoning, yet their computational cost remains significant. Probably approximately correct (PAC) reasoning provides statistical guarantees for efficient…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jianguo Huang , Hao Zeng , Bingyi Jing , Hongxin Wei , Bo An

We propose a novel class of deep stochastic predictors for classifying metric data on graphs within the PAC-Bayes risk certification paradigm. Classifiers are realized as linearly parametrized deep assignment flows with random initial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-21 Bastian Boll , Alexander Zeilmann , Stefania Petra , Christoph Schnörr

We consider using an ensemble of binary classifiers for transductive prediction, when unlabeled test data are known in advance. We derive minimax optimal rules for confidence-rated prediction in this setting. By using PAC-Bayes analysis on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-01-19 Akshay Balsubramani , Yoav Freund

Algorithms often have tunable parameters that impact performance metrics such as runtime and solution quality. For many algorithms used in practice, no parameter settings admit meaningful worst-case bounds, so the parameters are made…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Maria-Florina Balcan , Dan DeBlasio , Travis Dick , Carl Kingsford , Tuomas Sandholm , Ellen Vitercik

In this paper, we derive a PAC-Bayes bound on the generalisation gap, in a supervised time-series setting for a special class of discrete-time non-linear dynamical systems. This class includes stable recurrent neural networks (RNN), and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-12 Deividas Eringis , John Leth , Zheng-Hua Tan , Rafal Wisniewski , Mihaly Petreczky

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

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

Deep nets generalize well despite having more parameters than the number of training samples. Recent works try to give an explanation using PAC-Bayes and Margin-based analyses, but do not as yet result in sample complexity bounds better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-28 Sanjeev Arora , Rong Ge , Behnam Neyshabur , Yi Zhang

Explaining how overparametrized neural networks simultaneously achieve low risk and zero empirical risk on benchmark datasets is an open problem. PAC-Bayes bounds optimized using variational inference (VI) have been recently proposed as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Konstantinos Pitas