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Chirag Pabbaraju

10 accepted papers

2025

Relating Misfit to Gain in Weak-to-Strong Generalization Beyond the Squared Loss

ICML 2025poster

The paradigm of weak-to-strong generalization constitutes the training of a strong AI model on data labeled by a weak AI model, with the goal that the strong model nevertheless outperforms its weak supervisor on the target task of interest. For the setting of real-valued regression with the squared…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Quantifying the Gain in Weak-to-Strong Generalization

NeurIPS 2024poster

Recent advances in large language models have shown capabilities that are extraordinary and near-superhuman. These models operate with such complexity that reliably evaluating and aligning them proves challenging for humans. This leads to the natural question: can guidance from weak models (like hum…

2023

Harnessing the power of choices in decision tree learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

We propose a simple generalization of standard and empirically successful decision tree learning algorithms such as ID3, C4.5, and CART. These algorithms, which have been central to machine learning for decades, are greedy in nature: they grow a decision tree by iteratively splitting on the best a…

2023

Pitfalls of Gaussians as a noise distribution in NCE

ICLR 2023poster

Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) is a popular approach for learning probability density functions parameterized up to a constant of proportionality. The main idea is to design a classification problem for distinguishing training data from samples from an (easy-to-sample) noise distribution $q$, in…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2023

Provable benefits of score matching

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Score matching is an alternative to maximum likelihood (ML) for estimating a probability distribution parametrized up to a constant of proportionality. By fitting the ''score'' of the distribution, it sidesteps the need to compute this constant of proportionality (which is often intractable). While…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2021

Universal Approximation Using Well-Conditioned Normalizing Flows

NeurIPS 2021poster

Normalizing flows are a widely used class of latent-variable generative models with a tractable likelihood. Affine-coupling models [Dinh et al., 2014, 2016] are a particularly common type of normalizing flows, for which the Jacobian of the latent-to-observable-variable transformation is triangular,…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2020

Efficient semidefinite-programming-based inference for binary and multi-class MRFs

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Probabilistic inference in pairwise Markov Random Fields (MRFs), i.e. computing the partition function or computing a MAP estimate of the variables, is a foundational problem in probabilistic graphical models. Semidefinite programming relaxations have long been a theoretically powerful tool for anal…

2018

Multiple Instance Learning for Efficient Sequential Data Classification on Resource-constrained Devices

NeurIPS 2018poster

We study the problem of fast and efficient classification of sequential data (such as time-series) on tiny devices, which is critical for various IoT related applications like audio keyword detection or gesture detection. Such tasks are cast as a standard classification task by sliding windows over…