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Alireza Makhzani

14 accepted papers

2024

A Computational Framework for Solving Wasserstein Lagrangian Flows

ICML 2024poster

The dynamical formulation of the optimal transport can be extended through various choices of the underlying geometry (*kinetic energy*), and the regularization of density paths (*potential energy*). These combinations yield different variational problems (*Lagrangians*), encompassing many variation…

2024

Can We Remove the Square-Root in Adaptive Gradient Methods? A Second-Order Perspective

ICML 2024poster

Adaptive gradient optimizers like Adam(W) are the default training algorithms for many deep learning architectures, such as transformers. Their diagonal preconditioner is based on the gradient outer product which is incorporated into the parameter update via a square root. While these methods are of…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2024

Probabilistic Inference in Language Models via Twisted Sequential Monte Carlo

ICML 2024oral

Numerous capability and safety techniques of Large Language Models (LLMs), including RLHF, automated red-teaming, prompt engineering, and infilling, can be cast as sampling from an unnormalized target distribution defined by a given reward or potential function over the full sequence. In this work,…

2024

Random Cycle Coding: Lossless Compression of Cluster Assignments via Bits-Back Coding

NeurIPS 2024poster

We present an optimal method for encoding cluster assignments of arbitrary data sets. Our method, Random Cycle Coding (RCC), encodes data sequentially and sends assignment information as cycles of the permutation defined by the order of encoded elements. RCC does not require any training and its wor…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Structured Inverse-Free Natural Gradient Descent: Memory-Efficient & Numerically-Stable KFAC

ICML 2024poster

Second-order methods such as KFAC can be useful for neural net training. However, they are often memory-inefficient since their preconditioning Kronecker factors are dense, and numerically unstable in low precision as they require matrix inversion or decomposition. These limitations render such meth…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

Action Matching: Learning Stochastic Dynamics from Samples

ICML 2023poster

Learning the continuous dynamics of a system from snapshots of its temporal marginals is a problem which appears throughout natural sciences and machine learning, including in quantum systems, single-cell biological data, and generative modeling. In these settings, we assume access to cross-sectiona…

2023

One-Shot Compression of Large Edge-Exchangeable Graphs using Bits-Back Coding

ICML 2023poster

We present a one-shot method for compressing large labeled graphs called Random Edge Coding. When paired with a parameter-free model based on Pólya's Urn, the worst-case computational and memory complexities scale quasi-linearly and linearly with the number of observed edges, making it efficient on…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Wasserstein Quantum Monte Carlo: A Novel Approach for Solving the Quantum Many-Body Schrödinger Equation

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Solving the quantum many-body Schrödinger equation is a fundamental and challenging problem in the fields of quantum physics, quantum chemistry, and material sciences. One of the common computational approaches to this problem is Quantum Variational Monte Carlo (QVMC), in which ground-state solution…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2022

Improving Mutual Information Estimation with Annealed and Energy-Based Bounds

ICLR 2022poster

Mutual information (MI) is a fundamental quantity in information theory and machine learning. However, direct estimation of MI is intractable, even if the true joint probability density for the variables of interest is known, as it involves estimating a potentially high-dimensional log partition fun…

2021

Improving Lossless Compression Rates via Monte Carlo Bits-Back Coding

ICML 2021oral

Latent variable models have been successfully applied in lossless compression with the bits-back coding algorithm. However, bits-back suffers from an increase in the bitrate equal to the KL divergence between the approximate posterior and the true posterior. In this paper, we show how to remove this…

2021

Variational Model Inversion Attacks

NeurIPS 2021poster

Given the ubiquity of deep neural networks, it is important that these models do not reveal information about sensitive data that they have been trained on. In model inversion attacks, a malicious user attempts to recover the private dataset used to train a supervised neural network. A successful mo…

2020

Evaluating Lossy Compression Rates of Deep Generative Models

ICML 2020poster

The field of deep generative modeling has succeeded in producing astonishingly realistic-seeming images and audio, but quantitative evaluation remains a challenge. Log-likelihood is an appealing metric due to its grounding in statistics and information theory, but it can be challenging to estimate f…