No Arabic abstract
Many practical machine learning tasks can be framed as Structured prediction problems, where several output variables are predicted and considered interdependent. Recent theoretical advances in structured prediction have focused on obtaining fast rates convergence guarantees, especially in the Implicit Loss Embedding (ILE) framework. PAC-Bayes has gained interest recently for its capacity of producing tight risk bounds for predictor distributions. This work proposes a novel PAC-Bayes perspective on the ILE Structured prediction framework. We present two generalization bounds, on the risk and excess risk, which yield insights into the behavior of ILE predictors. Two learning algorithms are derived from these bounds. The algorithms are implemented and their behavior analyzed, with source code available at url{https://github.com/theophilec/PAC-Bayes-ILE-Structured-Prediction}.
Contrastive unsupervised representation learning (CURL) is the state-of-the-art technique to learn representations (as a set of features) from unlabelled data. While CURL has collected several empirical successes recently, theoretical understanding of its performance was still missing. In a recent work, Arora et al. (2019) provide the first generalisation bounds for CURL, relying on a Rademacher complexity. We extend their framework to the flexible PAC-Bayes setting, allowing us to deal with the non-iid setting. We present PAC-Bayesian generalisation bounds for CURL, which are then used to derive a new representation learning algorithm. Numerical experiments on real-life datasets illustrate that our algorithm achieves competitive accuracy, and yields non-vacuous generalisation bounds.
We introduce a new and rigorously-formulated PAC-Bayes few-shot meta-learning algorithm that implicitly learns a prior distribution of the model of interest. Our proposed method extends the PAC-Bayes framework from a single task setting to the few-shot learning setting to upper-bound generalisation errors on unseen tasks and samples. We also propose a generative-based approach to model the shared prior and the posterior of task-specific model parameters more expressively compared to the usual diagonal Gaussian assumption. We show that the models trained with our proposed meta-learning algorithm are well calibrated and accurate, with state-of-the-art calibration and classification results on few-shot classification (mini-ImageNet and tiered-ImageNet) and regression (multi-modal task-distribution regression) benchmarks.
We study the issue of PAC-Bayesian domain adaptation: We want to learn, from a source domain, a majority vote model dedicated to a target one. Our theoretical contribution brings a new perspective by deriving an upper-bound on the target risk where the distributions divergence---expressed as a ratio---controls the trade-off between a source error measure and the target voters disagreement. Our bound suggests that one has to focus on regions where the source data is informative.From this result, we derive a PAC-Bayesian generalization bound, and specialize it to linear classifiers. Then, we infer a learning algorithmand perform experiments on real data.
We propose a novel hybrid loss for multiclass and structured prediction problems that is a convex combination of a log loss for Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) and a multiclass hinge loss for Support Vector Machines (SVMs). We provide a sufficient condition for when the hybrid loss is Fisher consistent for classification. This condition depends on a measure of dominance between labels--specifically, the gap between the probabilities of the best label and the second best label. We also prove Fisher consistency is necessary for parametric consistency when learning models such as CRFs. We demonstrate empirically that the hybrid loss typically performs least as well as--and often better than--both of its constituent losses on a variety of tasks, such as human action recognition. In doing so we also provide an empirical comparison of the efficacy of probabilistic and margin based approaches to multiclass and structured prediction.
We develop a framework for derandomising PAC-Bayesian generalisation bounds achieving a margin on training data, relating this process to the concentration-of-measure phenomenon. We apply these tools to linear prediction, single-hidden-layer neural networks with an unusual erf activation function, and deep ReLU networks, obtaining new bounds. The approach is also extended to the idea of partial-derandomisation where only some layers are derandomised and the others are stochastic. This allows empirical evaluation of single-hidden-layer networks on more complex datasets, and helps bridge the gap between generalisation bounds for non-stochastic deep networks and those for randomised deep networks as generally examined in PAC-Bayes.