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Invited Talk
in
Workshop: PAC-Bayes Meets Interactive Learning

Invited Talk 2: A unified recipe for deriving (time-uniform) PAC-Bayes bounds

Aaditya Ramdas


Abstract:

We present a unified framework for deriving PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds. Unlike most previous literature on this topic, our bounds are anytime-valid (i.e., time-uniform), meaning that they hold at all stopping times, not only for a fixed sample size. Our approach combines four tools in the following order: (a) nonnegative supermartingales or reverse submartingales, (b) the method of mixtures, (c) the Donsker-Varadhan formula (or other convex duality principles), and (d) Ville's inequality. Our main result is a PAC-Bayes theorem which holds for a wide class of discrete stochastic processes. We show how this result implies time-uniform versions of well-known classical PAC-Bayes bounds, such as those of Seeger, McAllester, Maurer, and Catoni, in addition to many recent bounds. We also present several novel bounds.

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