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Andrea Montanari

15 accepted papers

2026

Train on Validation (ToV): Fast data selection with applications to fine-tuning

ICLR 2026poster

State-of-the-art machine learning often follows a two-stage process: $(i)$ pre-training on large, general-purpose datasets; $(ii)$ fine-tuning on task-specific data. In fine-tuning, selecting training examples that closely reflect the target distribution is crucial. However, it is often the case t…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Dynamical Decoupling of Generalization and Overfitting in Large Two-Layer Networks

NeurIPS 2025oral

Understanding the inductive bias and generalization properties of large overparametrized machine learning models requires to characterize the dynamics of the training algorithm. We study the learning dynamics of large two-layer neural networks via dynamical mean field theory, a well established tec…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Towards a statistical theory of data selection under weak supervision

ICLR 2024oral

Given a sample of size $N$, it is often useful to select a subsample of smaller size $n<N$ to be used for statistical estimation or learning. Such a data selection step is useful to reduce the requirements of data labeling and the computational complexity of learning. We assume to be given $N$ unla…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2021

Streaming Belief Propagation for Community Detection

NeurIPS 2021poster

The community detection problem requires to cluster the nodes of a network into a small number of well-connected ‘communities’. There has been substantial recent progress in characterizing the fundamental statistical limits of community detection under simple stochastic block models. However, in re…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2020

When Do Neural Networks Outperform Kernel Methods?

NeurIPS 2020poster

For a certain scaling of the initialization of stochastic gradient descent (SGD), wide neural networks (NN) have been shown to be well approximated by reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) methods. Recent empirical work showed that, for some classification tasks, RKHS methods can replace NNs with…

2019

On the Connection Between Learning Two-Layer Neural Networks and Tensor Decomposition

AISTATS 2019poster

We establish connections between the problem of learning a two-layer neural network and tensor decomposition. We consider a model with feature vectors $x$, $r$ hidden units with weights $w_i$ and output $y$, i.e., $y=\sum_{i=1}^r \sigma(w_i^{T} x)$, with activation functions given by low-degree poly…

Cited by 60SourcePDFScholar
2017

Inference in Graphical Models via Semidefinite Programming Hierarchies

NeurIPS 2017poster

Maximum A posteriori Probability (MAP) inference in graphical models amounts to solving a graph-structured combinatorial optimization problem. Popular inference algorithms such as belief propagation (BP) and generalized belief propagation (GBP) are intimately related to linear programming (LP) rela…

Cited by 34SourcePDFScholar
2015

On the Limitation of Spectral Methods: From the Gaussian Hidden Clique Problem to Rank-One Perturbations of Gaussian Tensors

NeurIPS 2015poster

We consider the following detection problem: given a realization of asymmetric matrix $X$ of dimension $n$, distinguish between the hypothesisthat all upper triangular variables are i.i.d. Gaussians variableswith mean 0 and variance $1$ and the hypothesis that there is aplanted principal submatrix $…

Cited by 71SourcePDFScholar