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We are motivated by the problem of learning policies for robotic systems with rich sensory inputs (e.g., vision) in a manner that allows us to guarantee generalization to environments unseen during training. We provide a framework for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-25 Abhinav Agarwal , Sushant Veer , Allen Z. Ren , Anirudha Majumdar

The PAC-Bayesian framework has significantly advanced the understanding of statistical learning, particularly for majority voting methods. Despite its successes, its application to multi-view learning -- a setting with multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Mehdi Hennequin , Abdelkrim Zitouni , Khalid Benabdeslem , Haytham Elghazel , Yacine Gaci

Generalization bounds for deep learning models are typically vacuous, not computable or restricted to specific model classes. In this paper, we tackle these issues by providing new disagreement-based certificates for the gap between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Mathieu Bazinet , Valentina Zantedeschi , Pascal Germain

This tutorial gives a concise overview of existing PAC-Bayesian theory focusing on three generalization bounds. The first is an Occam bound which handles rules with finite precision parameters and which states that generalization loss is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-07-09 David McAllester

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-14 Xinping Yi , Gaojie Jin , Xiaowei Huang , Shi Jin

We present a PAC-Bayesian analysis of lifelong learning. In the lifelong learning problem, a sequence of learning tasks is observed one-at-a-time, and the goal is to transfer information acquired from previous tasks to new learning tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-17 Hamish Flynn , David Reeb , Melih Kandemir , Jan Peters

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

This work studies discrete-time discounted Markov decision processes with continuous state and action spaces and addresses the inverse problem of inferring a cost function from observed optimal behavior. We first consider the case in which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-27 Angeliki Kamoutsi , Peter Schmitt-Förster , Tobias Sutter , Volkan Cevher , John Lygeros

We explore the family of methods "PAC-Bayes with Backprop" (PBB) to train probabilistic neural networks by minimizing PAC-Bayes bounds. We present two training objectives, one derived from a previously known PAC-Bayes bound, and a second…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-07 Omar Rivasplata , Vikram M Tankasali , Csaba Szepesvari

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

We study the generalization error of randomized learning algorithms -- focusing on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) -- using a novel combination of PAC-Bayes and algorithmic stability. Importantly, our generalization bounds hold for all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Ben London

While PAC-Bayes is now an established learning framework for light-tailed losses (\emph{e.g.}, subgaussian or subexponential), its extension to the case of heavy-tailed losses remains largely uncharted and has attracted a growing interest…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-25 Maxime Haddouche , Benjamin Guedj

We establish disintegrated PAC-Bayesian generalisation bounds for models trained with gradient descent methods or continuous gradient flows. Contrary to standard practice in the PAC-Bayesian setting, our result applies to optimisation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-12 Eugenio Clerico , Tyler Farghly , George Deligiannidis , Benjamin Guedj , Arnaud Doucet

This paper presents a PAC-Bayes framework for learning controllers for unknown stochastic linear discrete-time systems, where the system parameters are drawn from a fixed but unknown distribution. We derive a data-dependent high probability…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-22 Yujia Luo , Ye Pu , Jonathan H. Manton , Jingge Zhu

In this paper, we present new high-probability PAC-Bayes bounds for different types of losses. Firstly, for losses with a bounded range, we recover a strengthened version of Catoni's bound that holds uniformly for all parameter values. This…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-05 Borja Rodríguez-Gálvez , Ragnar Thobaben , Mikael Skoglund

We introduce a new PAC-Bayes oracle bound for unbounded losses that extends Cram\'er-Chernoff bounds to the PAC-Bayesian setting. The proof technique relies on controlling the tails of certain random variables involving the Cram\'er…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-31 Ioar Casado , Luis A. Ortega , Aritz Pérez , Andrés R. Masegosa

Recently, there has been significant progress in understanding reinforcement learning in discounted infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) by deriving tight sample complexity bounds. However, in many real-world applications, an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-05-12 Christoph Dann , Emma Brunskill

This paper presents an approach for learning vision-based planners that provably generalize to novel environments (i.e., environments unseen during training). We leverage the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC)-Bayes framework to obtain an…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-11 Sushant Veer , Anirudha Majumdar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Vaishnavh Nagarajan , J. Zico Kolter

PAC-Bayes has recently re-emerged as an effective theory with which one can derive principled learning algorithms with tight performance guarantees. However, applications of PAC-Bayes to bandit problems are relatively rare, which is a great…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Hamish Flynn , David Reeb , Melih Kandemir , Jan Peters