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Christopher Liaw

9 accepted papers

2025

A Unified Approach to Submodular Maximization Under Noise

NeurIPS 2025poster

We consider the problem of maximizing a submodular function with access to a _noisy_ value oracle for the function instead of an exact value oracle. Similar to prior work, we assume that the noisy oracle is persistent in that multiple calls to the oracle for a specific set always return the same val…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Polynomial Time and Private Learning of Unbounded Gaussian Mixture Models

ICML 2023poster

We study the problem of privately estimating the parameters of $d$-dimensional Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) with $k$ components. For this, we develop a technique to reduce the problem to its non-private counterpart. This allows us to privatize existing non-private algorithms in a blackbox manner,…

Cited by 34SourcePDFScholar
2021

Convergence Analysis of No-Regret Bidding Algorithms in Repeated Auctions

AAAI 2021technical

The connection between games and no-regret algorithms has been widely studied in the literature. A fundamental result is that when all players play no-regret strategies, this produces a sequence of actions whose time-average is a coarse-correlated equilibrium of the game. However, much less is known…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar
2019

A new dog learns old tricks: RL finds classic optimization algorithms

ICLR 2019poster

This paper introduces a novel framework for learning algorithms to solve online combinatorial optimization problems. Towards this goal, we introduce a number of key ideas from traditional algorithms and complexity theory. First, we draw a new connection between primal-dual methods and reinforcement…

Cited by 57SourcePDFScholar
2018

Nearly tight sample complexity bounds for learning mixtures of Gaussians via sample compression schemes

NeurIPS 2018oral

We prove that ϴ(k d^2 / ε^2) samples are necessary and sufficient for learning a mixture of k Gaussians in R^d, up to error ε in total variation distance. This improves both the known upper bounds and lower bounds for this problem. For mixtures of axis-aligned Gaussians, we show that O(k d / ε^2) sa…

Cited by 77SourcePDFScholar