generalisation guarantee
A PAC-Bayesian View of Generalisation for Physics-Informed Machine Learning
Nguyen, Thien V., Habrard, Amaury, Guedj, Benjamin
Physics-informed machine learning (PIML) integrates mechanistic knowledge, typically in the form of partial differential equations (PDE), into data-driven models. Despite strong empirical performance, its statistical generalisation properties remain poorly understood, particularly in the regression setting with unbounded losses. Existing analyses rely on approximation or stability arguments and do not fully capture how physical structure influences generalisation from finite data. In this work, we develop a PAC-Bayesian framework for PIML that provides high-probability generalisation guarantees in the presence of unbounded losses. We adopt a multi-task perspective that jointly treats data fidelity, PDE residuals, initial and boundary conditions, avoiding the looseness induced by standard union-bound approaches. Our analysis leverages the structure of physics-informed objectives to derive novel bounds where the complexity scales with input-gradient norms of the losses, revealing a direct link between physical regularity and generalisation. We instantiate this framework under Sobolev and Poincarรฉ-type assumptions, yielding two classes of bounds that trade off statistical complexity and smoothness in different regimes. Building on these results, we propose a self-bounding-aware learning algorithm that directly optimises tractable surrogates of the derived bounds, along with a practical procedure to estimate the associated constants in realistic settings. Empirical evaluations on standard PDE benchmarks demonstrate that our bounds are non-vacuous, significantly tighter than union-bound baselines, and can be effectively minimised during training. Overall, our results provide a principled statistical foundation for the generalisation of physics-informed models.
Model Merging is Secretly Certifiable: Non-Vacuous Generalisation Bounds for Low-Shot Learning
Kim, Taehoon, Gouk, Henry, Kim, Minyoung, Hospedales, Timothy
Certifying the IID generalisation ability of deep networks is the first of many requirements for trusting AI in high-stakes applications from medicine to security. However, when instantiating generalisation bounds for deep networks it remains challenging to obtain non-vacuous guarantees, especially when applying contemporary large models on the small scale data prevalent in such high-stakes fields. In this paper, we draw a novel connection between a family of learning methods based on model fusion and generalisation certificates, and surprisingly show that with minor adjustment several existing learning strategies already provide non-trivial generalisation guarantees. Essentially, by focusing on data-driven learning of downstream tasks by fusion rather than fine-tuning, the certified generalisation gap becomes tiny and independent of the base network size, facilitating its certification. Our results show for the first time non-trivial generalisation guarantees for learning with as low as 100 examples, while using vision models such as VIT-B and language models such as mistral-7B. This observation is significant as it has immediate implications for facilitating the certification of existing systems as trustworthy, and opens up new directions for research at the intersection of practice and theory.
How good is PAC-Bayes at explaining generalisation?
Picard-Weibel, Antoine, Clerico, Eugenio, Moscoviz, Roman, Guedj, Benjamin
The widespread use of modern neural networks for high-stakes applications requires safety guarantees on their performance on future data, which have not been observed during the training [Xu and Goodacre, 2018, Russell and Norvig, 2020]. A well-established approach to train and evaluate the performance of a predictor consists of the following steps. First, the available data are split in a train and a test datasets. The training data are used to construct the predictor, whose performance is then assessed on the test data (empirical test risk). Finally, concentration inequalities [Boucheron et al., 2013] are used to derive, from this finite-sample test, an upper bound on the model expected performance over the data distribution (population risk) [Langford, 2005].
Federated Learning with Nonvacuous Generalisation Bounds
Jobic, Pierre, Haddouche, Maxime, Guedj, Benjamin
We introduce a novel strategy to train randomised predictors in federated learning, where each node of the network aims at preserving its privacy by releasing a local predictor but keeping secret its training dataset with respect to the other nodes. We then build a global randomised predictor which inherits the properties of the local private predictors in the sense of a PAC-Bayesian generalisation bound. We consider the synchronous case where all nodes share the same training objective (derived from a generalisation bound), and the asynchronous case where each node may have its own personalised training objective. We show through a series of numerical experiments that our approach achieves a comparable predictive performance to that of the batch approach where all datasets are shared across nodes. Moreover the predictors are supported by numerically nonvacuous generalisation bounds while preserving privacy for each node. We explicitly compute the increment on predictive performance and generalisation bounds between batch and federated settings, highlighting the price to pay to preserve privacy.