Pith. sign in

REVIEW 6 cited by

User-friendly introduction to PAC-Bayes bounds

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2110.11216 v6 pith:MDNCOIHI submitted 2021-10-21 stat.ML cs.LGmath.STstat.TH

classification stat.MLcs.LGmath.STstat.TH
keywords boundspac-bayespredictorsdistributionintroductionprobabilitysomeaccording
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

Aggregated predictors are obtained by making a set of basic predictors vote according to some weights, that is, to some probability distribution. Randomized predictors are obtained by sampling in a set of basic predictors, according to some prescribed probability distribution. Thus, aggregated and randomized predictors have in common that they are not defined by a minimization problem, but by a probability distribution on the set of predictors. In statistical learning theory, there is a set of tools designed to understand the generalization ability of such procedures: PAC-Bayesian or PAC-Bayes bounds. Since the original PAC-Bayes bounds of D. McAllester, these tools have been considerably improved in many directions (we will for example describe a simplified version of the localization technique of O. Catoni that was missed by the community, and later rediscovered as "mutual information bounds"). Very recently, PAC-Bayes bounds received a considerable attention: for example there was workshop on PAC-Bayes at NIPS 2017, "(Almost) 50 Shades of Bayesian Learning: PAC-Bayesian trends and insights", organized by B. Guedj, F. Bach and P. Germain. One of the reason of this recent success is the successful application of these bounds to neural networks by G. Dziugaite and D. Roy. An elementary introduction to PAC-Bayes theory is still missing. This is an attempt to provide such an introduction.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 24 citations worldwide. Full citation record

  1. Post-Cut Metadata Inference Attacks on Quantum Circuit Cutting Pipelines

    quant-ph 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 8.0 of 10

    Post-cut metadata from quantum circuit fragments enables high-accuracy inference of algorithm family, cut mechanism, and Hamiltonian structure via machine learning on fragment width, depth, and gate counts.

  2. Tighter Information-Theoretic Generalization Bounds via a Novel Class of Change of Measure Inequalities

    cs.IT 2026-02 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    A unified DPI-based framework yields novel change-of-measure inequalities that produce tighter high-probability generalization bounds.

  3. Generalization of Gibbs and Langevin Monte Carlo Algorithms in the Interpolation Regime

    cs.LG 2025-10 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    New PAC-Bayes bounds for the Gibbs posterior remain non-vacuous in the interpolation regime and can be approximated by Langevin Monte Carlo, but the tight experimental numbers rely on an unproved random-label calibrat...

  4. Model Diffusion for Certifiable Few-shot Transfer Learning

    cs.LG 2025-02 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    STEEL samples a finite set of PEFT adapters from a diffusion model and selects the best on the downstream support set, producing non-vacuous PAC-Bayes generalization certificates for low-shot LLM and vision transfer learning.

  5. Model Merging is Secretly Certifiable: Non-Vacuous Generalisation Bounds for Low-Shot Learning

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    First non-vacuous PAC-Bayes certificates for large vision and language models in the 100-example low-shot regime, obtained by reinterpreting model merging as a low-dimensional posterior.

  6. Uncertainty Quantification for Misspecified Machine Learned Interatomic Potentials

    cond-mat.mtrl-sci 2025-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    POPS uncertainty bounds from misspecification-aware parameter sampling envelop DFT reference values for a broad range of tungsten properties and for MACE-MPA-0 energies.

Pith tools