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Bayes factors are characterized by both the powerful mathematical framework of Bayesian statistics and the useful interpretation as evidence quantification. Former requires a parameter distribution that changes by seeing the data, latter…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-20 Patrick Schwaferts , Thomas Augustin

Is there a way to design powerful AI systems based on machine learning methods that would satisfy probabilistic safety guarantees? With the long-term goal of obtaining a probabilistic guarantee that would apply in every context, we consider…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Yoshua Bengio , Michael K. Cohen , Nikolay Malkin , Matt MacDermott , Damiano Fornasiere , Pietro Greiner , Younesse Kaddar

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

Many algorithms have been recently proposed for causal machine learning. Yet, there is little to no theory on their quality, especially considering finite samples. In this work, we propose a theory based on generalization bounds that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-16 Daniel Csillag , Claudio José Struchiner , Guilherme Tegoni Goedert

We study generalized Bayesian inference under misspecification, i.e. when the model is 'wrong but useful'. Generalized Bayes equips the likelihood with a learning rate $\eta$. We show that for generalized linear models (GLMs),…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-06-01 Rianne de Heide , Alisa Kirichenko , Nishant Mehta , Peter Grünwald

Physics-informed machine learning (PIML) integrates mechanistic knowledge, typically in the form of partial differential equations (PDE), into data-driven models. Despite strong empirical performance, its statistical generalisation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Thien V. Nguyen , Amaury Habrard , Benjamin Guedj

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

Bayesian hypothesis testing is investigated when the prior probabilities of the hypotheses, taken as a random vector, are quantized. Nearest neighbor and centroid conditions are derived using mean Bayes risk error as a distortion measure…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2008-09-20 Kush R. Varshney , Lav R. Varshney

The behavior of many Bayesian models used in machine learning critically depends on the choice of prior distributions, controlled by some hyperparameters that are typically selected by Bayesian optimization or cross-validation. This…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-09 Eliezer de Souza da Silva , Tomasz Kuśmierczyk , Marcelo Hartmann , Arto Klami

We formulate weighted graph clustering as a prediction problem: given a subset of edge weights we analyze the ability of graph clustering to predict the remaining edge weights. This formulation enables practical and theoretical comparison…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2010-09-03 Yevgeny Seldin

We give a novel, unified derivation of conditional PAC-Bayesian and mutual information (MI) generalization bounds. We derive conditional MI bounds as an instance, with special choice of prior, of conditional MAC-Bayesian (Mean Approximately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Peter Grünwald , Thomas Steinke , Lydia Zakynthinou

Bounds on Bayesian posterior convergence rates, assuming the prior satisfies both local and global support conditions, are now readily available. In this paper we explore, in the context of density estimation, Bayesian convergence rates…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-12-25 Ryan Martin , Liang Hong , Stephen G. Walker

Goldwasser et al. (2021) recently proposed the setting of PAC verification, where a hypothesis (machine learning model) that purportedly satisfies the agnostic PAC learning objective is verified using an interactive proof. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-06 Saachi Mutreja , Jonathan Shafer

We derive information-theoretic generalization bounds for supervised learning algorithms based on the information contained in predictions rather than in the output of the training algorithm. These bounds improve over the existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-06 Hrayr Harutyunyan , Maxim Raginsky , Greg Ver Steeg , Aram Galstyan

Conformal prediction methodology has recently been extended to the covariate shift setting, where the distribution of covariates differs between training and test data. While existing results ensure that the prediction sets from these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-09 Mehrdad Pournaderi , Yu Xiang

One method for obtaining generalizable solutions to machine learning tasks when presented with diverse training environments is to find \textit{invariant representations} of the data. These are representations of the covariates such that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-16 Advait Parulekar , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Sanjay Shakkottai

The key distinguishing property of a Bayesian approach is marginalization, rather than using a single setting of weights. Bayesian marginalization can particularly improve the accuracy and calibration of modern deep neural networks, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-31 Andrew Gordon Wilson , Pavel Izmailov

Approximate Bayesian computing is a powerful likelihood-free method that has grown increasingly popular since early applications in population genetics. However, complications arise in the theoretical justification for Bayesian inference…

Computation · Statistics 2018-12-03 Suzanne Thornton , Wentao Li , Min-ge Xie

Both PAC-Bayesian and Sample Compress learning frameworks are instrumental for deriving tight (non-vacuous) generalization bounds for neural networks. We leverage these results in a meta-learning scheme, relying on a hypernetwork that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Benjamin Leblanc , Mathieu Bazinet , Nathaniel D'Amours , Alexandre Drouin , Pascal Germain

Traditional generalization results in statistical learning require a training data set made of independently drawn examples. Most of the recent efforts to relax this independence assumption have considered either purely temporal (mixing)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-14 Baptiste Abélès , Eugenio Clerico , Gergely Neu