AISTATS 2022poster27 citations

Conditionally Gaussian PAC-Bayes

Eugenio Clerico, George Deligiannidis, Arnaud Doucet

Abstract

Recent studies have empirically investigated different methods to train stochastic neural networks on a classification task by optimising a PAC-Bayesian bound via stochastic gradient descent. Most of these procedures need to replace the misclassification error with a surrogate loss, leading to a mismatch between the optimisation objective and the actual generalisation bound. The present paper proposes a novel training algorithm that optimises the PAC-Bayesian bound, without relying on any surrogate loss. Empirical results show that this approach outperforms currently available PAC-Bayesian training methods.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v151-clerico22a,
  title = 	 { Conditionally Gaussian PAC-Bayes },
  author =       {Clerico, Eugenio and Deligiannidis, George and Doucet, Arnaud},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of The 25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
  pages = 	 {2311--2329},
  year = 	 {2022},
  editor = 	 {Camps-Valls, Gustau and Ruiz, Francisco J. R. and Valera, Isabel},
  volume = 	 {151},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {28--30 Mar},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v151/clerico22a/clerico22a.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v151/clerico22a.html},
  abstract = 	 { Recent studies have empirically investigated different methods to train stochastic neural networks on a classification task by optimising a PAC-Bayesian bound via stochastic gradient descent. Most of these procedures need to replace the misclassification error with a surrogate loss, leading to a mismatch between the optimisation objective and the actual generalisation bound. The present paper proposes a novel training algorithm that optimises the PAC-Bayesian bound, without relying on any surrogate loss. Empirical results show that this approach outperforms currently available PAC-Bayesian training methods. }
}
Conditionally Gaussian PAC-Bayes · AISTATS 2022