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Related papers: Empirical PAC-Bayes Bounds for Markov Chains

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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 consider a Markov chain on $\mathbb{R}^d$ with invariant measure $\mu$. We are interested in the rate of convergence of the empirical measures towards the invariant measure with respect to various dual distances, including in particular…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-10-13 Adrian Riekert

Multiple works regarding convergence analysis of Markov chains have led to spectral gap decomposition formulas of the form \[ \mathrm{Gap}(S) \geq c_0 \left[\inf_z \mathrm{Gap}(Q_z)\right] \mathrm{Gap}(\bar{S}), \] where $c_0$ is a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-04-03 Qian Qin

There is a long history of establishing central limit theorems for Markov chains. Quantitative bounds for chains with a spectral gap were proved by Mann and refined later. Recently, rates of convergence for the total variation distance were…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-08-24 Rafael Chiclana , Yuval Peres

In this paper we consider the field of local times of a discrete-time Markov chain on a general state space, and obtain uniform (in time) upper bounds on the total variation distance between this field and the one of a sequence of $n$…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-03-25 Diego F. de Bernardini , Christophe Gallesco , Serguei Popov

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Felix Biggs

We consider the problem of bounding mean first passage times for a class of continuous-time Markov chains that captures stochastic interactions between groups of identical agents. The quantitative analysis of such probabilistic population…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-04-07 Michael Backenköhler , Luca Bortolussi , Verena Wolf

This paper introduces a concept of approximate spectral gap to analyze the mixing time of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for which the usual spectral gap is degenerate or almost degenerate. We use the idea to analyze a class of…

Computation · Statistics 2019-08-26 Yves F. Atchadé

We study the Markov chain on $\mathbf{F}_p$ obtained by applying a function $f$ and adding $\pm\gamma$ with equal probability. When $f$ is a linear function, this is the well-studied Chung--Diaconis--Graham process. We consider two cases:…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-03-08 Jimmy He

Imprecise continuous-time Markov chains are a robust type of continuous-time Markov chains that allow for partially specified time-dependent parameters. Computing inferences for them requires the solution of a non-linear differential…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-10-11 Alexander Erreygers , Jasper De Bock

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 present two alternative ways to apply PAC-Bayesian analysis to sequences of dependent random variables. The first is based on a new lemma that enables to bound expectations of convex functions of certain dependent random variables by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-05-20 Yevgeny Seldin , François Laviolette , John Shawe-Taylor , Jan Peters , Peter Auer

This paper studies the truncation method from Alquier [1] to derive high-probability PAC-Bayes bounds for unbounded losses with heavy tails. Assuming that the $p$-th moment is bounded, the resulting bounds interpolate between a slow rate $1…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-26 Borja Rodríguez-Gálvez , Omar Rivasplata , Ragnar Thobaben , Mikael Skoglund

We study joint source-channel coding over Markov channels through the empirical coordination framework. More specifically, we aim at determining the empirical distributions of source and channel symbols that can be induced by a coding…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Mengyuan Zhao , Maël Le Treust , Tobias J. Oechtering

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 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

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

We prove an apparently novel concentration of measure result for Markov tree processes. The bound we derive reduces to the known bounds for Markov processes when the tree is a chain, thus strictly generalizing the known Markov process…

Probability · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Leonid Kontorovich

The recently established spectral Favard theorem for bounded banded matrices admitting a positive bidiagonal factorization is applied to a broader class of Markov chains with bounded banded transition matrices, extending beyond the…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-01-27 Amílcar Branquinho , Ana Foulquié-Moreno , Manuel Mañas

We consider two examples for a well-known method for obtaining concentration of measure (COM) bounds for a given observable in a given measure. The method is to consider an auxiliary Markov chain for which the invariant distribution is the…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-01-25 Michael Froehlich , Shannon Starr