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Adam Klivans

31 accepted papers

2026

Ambient Dataloops: Generative Models for Dataset Refinement

ICML 2026poster

We propose Ambient Dataloops, an iterative framework for refining datasets that makes it easier for diffusion models to learn the underlying data distribution. Modern datasets contain samples of highly varying quality, and training directly on such heterogeneous data often yields suboptimal models. …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

SwitchCraft: Programmatic Design of State-Switching Proteins

ICML 2026poster

Multistate mechanisms underlie many of the complex functions observed in natural proteins. The ability to rationally design multistate proteins would have transformative implications for many areas of biotechnology, yet lies beyond the capabilities of existing deep learning frameworks for protein de…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Triangle Multiplication is All You Need for Biomolecular Structure Representations

ICLR 2026poster

AlphaFold has transformed protein structure prediction, but emerging applications such as virtual ligand screening, proteome-wide folding, and de novo binder design demand predictions at a massive scale, where runtime and memory costs become prohibitive. A major bottleneck lies in the Pairformer bac…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Ambient Diffusion Omni: Training Good Models with Bad Data

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

We show how to use low-quality, synthetic, and out-of-distribution images to improve the quality of a diffusion model. Typically, diffusion models are trained on curated datasets that emerge from highly filtered data pools from the Web and other sources. We show that there is immense value in the lo…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Ambient Proteins - Training Diffusion Models on Noisy Structures

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

We present Ambient Protein Diffusion, a framework for training protein diffusion models that generates structures with unprecedented diversity and quality. State-of-the-art generative models are trained on computationally derived structures from AlphaFold2 (AF), as experimentally determined structur…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Distilling Structural Representations into Protein Sequence Models

ICLR 2025poster

Protein language (or sequence) models, like the popular ESM2, are now widely used tools for extracting evolution-based protein representations and have achieved significant success on core downstream biological tasks. A major open problem is how to obtain representations that best capture both the s…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Does Generation Require Memorization? Creative Diffusion Models using Ambient Diffusion

ICML 2025poster

There is strong empirical evidence that the stateof-the-art diffusion modeling paradigm leads to models that memorize the training set, especially when the training set is small. Prior methods to mitigate the memorization problem often lead to decrease in image quality. Is it possible to obtain stro…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Learning Neural Networks with Distribution Shift: Efficiently Certifiable Guarantees

ICLR 2025poster

We give the first provably efficient algorithms for learning neural networks with respect to distribution shift. We work in the Testable Learning with Distribution Shift framework (TDS learning) of Klivans et al. (2024), where the learner receives labeled examples from a training distribution and u…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

The Power of Iterative Filtering for Supervised Learning with (Heavy) Contamination

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Inspired by recent work on learning with distribution shift, we give a general outlier removal algorithm called *iterative polynomial filtering* and show a number of striking applications for supervised learning with contamination: (1) We show that any function class that can be approximated by low-…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

An Efficient Tester-Learner for Halfspaces

ICLR 2024poster

We give the first efficient algorithm for learning halfspaces in the testable learning model recently defined by Rubinfeld and Vasilyan [2022]. In this model, a learner certifies that the accuracy of its output hypothesis is near optimal whenever the training set passes an associated test, and train…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2024

Efficient Discrepancy Testing for Learning with Distribution Shift

NeurIPS 2024poster

A fundamental notion of distance between train and test distributions from the field of domain adaptation is discrepancy distance. While in general hard to compute, here we provide the first set of provably efficient algorithms for testing *localized* discrepancy distance, where discrepancy is compu…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Evolution-Inspired Loss Functions for Protein Representation Learning

ICML 2024poster

AI-based frameworks for protein engineering use self-supervised learning (SSL) to obtain representations for downstream mutation effect predictions. The most common training objective for these methods is wildtype accuracy: given a sequence or structure where a wildtype residue has been masked, pred…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Agnostically Learning Single-Index Models using Omnipredictors

NeurIPS 2023poster

We give the first result for agnostically learning Single-Index Models (SIMs) with arbitrary monotone and Lipschitz activations. All prior work either held only in the realizable setting or required the activation to be known. Moreover, we only require the marginal to have bounded second moments, wh…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2023

Ambient Diffusion: Learning Clean Distributions from Corrupted Data

NeurIPS 2023poster

We present the first diffusion-based framework that can learn an unknown distribution using only highly-corrupted samples. This problem arises in scientific applications where access to uncorrupted samples is impossible or expensive to acquire. Another benefit of our approach is the ability to train…

2023

HotProtein: A Novel Framework for Protein Thermostability Prediction and Editing

ICLR 2023poster

The molecular basis of protein thermal stability is only partially understood and has major significance for drug and vaccine discovery. The lack of datasets and standardized benchmarks considerably limits learning-based discovery methods. We present \texttt{HotProtein}, a large-scale protein datas…

2023

Predicting a Protein's Stability under a Million Mutations

NeurIPS 2023poster

Stabilizing proteins is a foundational step in protein engineering. However, the evolutionary pressure of all extant proteins makes identifying the scarce number of mutations that will improve thermodynamic stability challenging. Deep learning has recently emerged as a powerful tool for identifying…

2023

Tester-Learners for Halfspaces: Universal Algorithms

NeurIPS 2023oral

We give the first tester-learner for halfspaces that succeeds universally over a wide class of structured distributions. Our universal tester-learner runs in fully polynomial time and has the following guarantee: the learner achieves error $O(\mathrm{opt}) + \epsilon$ on any labeled distribution tha…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2022

Hardness of Noise-Free Learning for Two-Hidden-Layer Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2022accept

We give superpolynomial statistical query (SQ) lower bounds for learning two-hidden-layer ReLU networks with respect to Gaussian inputs in the standard (noise-free) model. No general SQ lower bounds were known for learning ReLU networks of any depth in this setting: previous SQ lower bounds held onl…

Cited by 38SourcePDFScholar
2020

Good Subnetworks Provably Exist: Pruning via Greedy Forward Selection

ICML 2020poster

Recent empirical works show that large deep neural networks are often highly redundant and one can find much smaller subnetworks without a significant drop of accuracy. However, most existing methods of network pruning are empirical and heuristic, leaving it open whether good subnetworks provably ex…

2020

Superpolynomial Lower Bounds for Learning One-Layer Neural Networks using Gradient Descent

ICML 2020poster

We give the first superpolynomial lower bounds for learning one-layer neural networks with respect to the Gaussian distribution for a broad class of algorithms. In the regression setting, we prove that gradient descent run on any classifier with respect to square loss will fail to achieve small test…

Cited by 88SourcePDFScholar
2019

Time/Accuracy Tradeoffs for Learning a ReLU with respect to Gaussian Marginals

NeurIPS 2019spotlight

We consider the problem of computing the best-fitting ReLU with respect to square-loss on a training set when the examples have been drawn according to a spherical Gaussian distribution (the labels can be arbitrary). Let $\opt < 1$ be the population loss of the best-fitting ReLU. We prove:…

Cited by 61SourcePDFScholar