43 accepted papers
In truncated linear regression, samples $(x,y)$ are shown only when the outcome $y$ falls inside a certain survival set $S^\star$ and the goal is to estimate the unknown $d$-dimensional regressor $w^\star$. This problem has a long history of study in Statistics and Machine Learning going back to the…
While continuous diffusion models have achieved remarkable success, discrete diffusion offers a unified framework for jointly modeling text and images. Beyond unification, discrete diffusion provides faster inference, finer control, and principled training-free guidance, making it well-suited for po…
Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) promise parallel generation and bidirectional context, yet they underperform autoregressive (AR) models in both *likelihood modeling* and *generated text quality*. We identify that this performance gap arises when important tokens (e.g., key words or low-frequency wo…
In pretraining data detection, the goal is to detect whether a given sentence is in the dataset used for training a Large Language Model LLM). Recent methods (such as Min-K % and Min-K%++) reveal that most training corpora are likely contaminated with both sensitive content and evaluation benchmarks…
Unconscious bias has been shown to influence how we assess our peers, with consequences for hiring, promotions and admissions. In this work, we focus on affinity bias, the component of unconscious bias which leads us to prefer people who are similar to us, despite no deliberate intention of favoriti…
We propose Reference-Based Modulation (RB-Modulation), a new plug-and-play solution for training-free personalization of diffusion models. Existing training-free approaches exhibit difficulties in (a) style extraction from reference images in the absence of additional style or content text descripti…
Generative models transform random noise into images, while their inversion aims to reconstruct structured noise for recovery and editing. This paper addresses two key tasks: (i) *inversion* and (ii) *editing* of real images using stochastic equivalents of rectified flow models (e.g., Flux). While D…
Sampling from the posterior distribution in latent diffusion models for inverse problems is computationally challenging. Existing methods often rely on Tweedie's first-order moments that tend to induce biased results. Second-order approximations are computationally prohibitive making standard revers…
Pandora’s Box is a fundamental stochastic optimization problem, where the decision-maker must find a good alternative, while minimizing the search cost of exploring the value of each alternative. In the original formulation, it is assumed that accurate distributions are given for the values of all t…
Embeddings play a pivotal role across various disciplines, offering compact representations of complex data structures. Randomized methods like Johnson-Lindenstrauss (JL) provide state-of-the-art and essentially unimprovable theoretical guarantees for achieving such representations. These guarantees…
In many interactive decision-making problems, there is contextual side information that remains fixed within the course of an interaction. This problem has been studied quite extensively under the assumption the context is fully observed, as well as in the opposing limit when the context is unobserv…
In many real-world decision problems there is partially observed, hidden or latent information that remains fixed throughout an interaction. Such decision problems can be modeled as Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs), where a latent variable is selected at the beginning of an interaction and…
We derive the first finite-time logarithmic Bayes regret upper bounds for Bayesian bandits. In a multi-armed bandit, we obtain $O(c_\Delta \log n)$ and $O(c_h \log^2 n)$ upper bounds for an upper confidence bound algorithm, where $c_h$ and $c_\Delta$ are constants depending on the prior distribution…
Deep Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning methods have empirically shown great promise in tackling challenging combinatorial problems. In those methods a deep neural network is used as a solution generator which is then trained by gradient-based methods (e.g., policy gradient) to successively…
We consider episodic reinforcement learning in reward-mixing Markov decision processes (RMMDPs): at the beginning of every episode nature randomly picks a latent reward model among $M$ candidates and an agent interacts with the MDP throughout the episode for $H$ time steps. Our goal is to learn a ne…
We present the first framework to solve linear inverse problems leveraging pre-trained \textit{latent} diffusion models. Previously proposed algorithms (such as DPS and DDRM) only apply to \textit{pixel-space} diffusion models. We theoretically analyze our algorithm showing provable sample recover…
We study the problem of Gaussian bandits with general side information, as first introduced by Wu, Szepesvári, and György. In this setting, the play of an arm reveals information about other arms, according to an arbitrary
Motivated by online recommendation systems, we propose the problem of finding the optimal policy in multitask contextual bandits when a small fraction $\alpha < 1/2$ of tasks (users) are arbitrary and adversarial. The remaining fraction of good users share the same instance of contextual bandits wit…
The stochastic multi-armed bandit setting has been recently studied in the non-stationary regime, where the mean payoff of each action is a non-decreasing function of the number of rounds passed since it was last played. This model captures natural behavioral aspects of the users which crucially det…
We study the problem of learning tree-structured Markov random fields (MRF) on discrete random variables with common support when the observations are corrupted by a k-ary symmetric noise channel with unknown probability of error. For Ising models (support size = 2), past work has shown that graph s…
We consider a multi-armed bandit problem with $M$ latent contexts, where an agent interacts with the environment for an episode of $H$ time steps. Depending on the length of the episode, the learner may not be able to estimate accurately the latent context. The resulting partial observation of the e…
Recent work has considered natural variations of the {\em multi-armed bandit} problem, where the reward distribution of each arm is a special function of the time passed since its last pulling. In this direction, a simple (yet widely applicable) model is that of {\em blocking bandits}, where an arm…
We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms’ mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a fixed number of future time steps. The above contextual sett…
We study the convergence rates of the EM algorithm for learning two-component mixed linear regression under all regimes of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We resolve a long-standing question that many recent results have attempted to tackle: we completely characterize the convergence behavior of EM, an…
In this work, we consider the regret minimization problem for reinforcement learning in latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDP). In an LMDP, an MDP is randomly drawn from a set of $M$ possible MDPs at the beginning of the interaction, but the identity of the chosen MDP is not revealed to the agent.…
A recent line of research focuses on the study of stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB), in the case where temporal correlations of specific structure are imposed between the player's actions and the reward distributions of the arms. These correlations lead to (sub-)optimal solutions that exhibit int…
Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP). There, a reward function is drawn from one of $M$ possible…
We study the problem of discovering the simplest latent variable that can make two observed discrete variables conditionally independent. The minimum entropy required for such a latent is known as common entropy in information theory. We extend this notion to Renyi common entropy by minimizing the R…
Large-scale machine learning training suffers from two prior challenges, specifically for nuclear-norm constrained problems with distributed systems: the synchronization slowdown due to the straggling workers, and high communication costs. In this work, we propose an asynchronous Stochastic Frank Wo…
We study the convergence of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for mixtures of linear regressions with an arbitrary number $k$ of components. We show that as long as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is $\tilde{\Omega}(k)$, well-initialized EM converges to the true regression parameters. Previous…
We provide a novel – and to the best of our knowledge, the first – algorithm for high dimensional sparse regression with constant fraction of corruptions in explanatory and/or response variables. Our algorithm recovers the true sparse parameters with sub-linear sample complexity,in the presence of a…
We consider the problem of learning the weighted edges of a balanced mixture of two undirected graphs from epidemic cascades. While mixture models are popular modeling tools, algorithmic development with rigorous guarantees has lagged. Graph mixtures are apparently no exception: until now, very litt…
We consider a covariate shift problem where one has access to several different training datasets for the same learning problem and a small validation set which possibly differs from all the individual training distributions. The distribution shift is due, in part, to \emph{unobserved} features in…
We consider estimating a high dimensional signal in $\R^n$ using a sublinear number of linear measurements. In analogy to classical compressed sensing, here we assume a generative model as a prior, that is, we assume the signal is represented by a deep generative model $G: \R^k \rightarrow \R^n$. Cl…
In this paper we study the problem of escaping from saddle points and achieving second-order optimality in a decentralized setting where a group of agents collaborate to minimize their aggregate objective function. We provide a non-asymptotic (finite-time) analysis and show that by following the ide…
We propose a generalized variant of Frank-Wolfe algorithm for solving a class of sparse/low-rank optimization problems. Our formulation includes Elastic Net, regularized SVMs and phase retrieval as special cases. The proposed Primal-Dual Block Generalized Frank-Wolfe algorithm reduces the per-iterat…
Consider jointly Gaussian random variables whose conditional independence structure is specified by a graphical model. If we observe realizations of the variables, we can compute the covariance matrix, and it is well known that the support of the inverse covariance matrix corresponds to the edges of…
The univariate statistics of bandpass-filtered images provide powerful features that drive many successful image quality assessment (IQA) algorithms. Bivariate Natural Scene Statistics (NSS), which model the joint statistics of multiple bandpass image samples also provide potentially powerful featur…
We consider the problem of Robust PCA in the fully and partially observed settings. Without corruptions, this is the well-known matrix completion problem. From a statistical standpoint this problem has been recently well-studied, and conditions on when recovery is possible (how many observations do…
We consider the weakly supervised binary classification problem where the labels are randomly flipped with probability $1-\alpha$. Although there exist numerous algorithms for this problem, it remains theoretically unexplored how the statistical accuracies and computational efficiency of these algor…
Binary embedding is a nonlinear dimension reduction methodology where high dimensional data are embedded into the Hamming cube while preserving the structure of the original space. Specifically, for an arbitrary N distinct points in \mathbbS^p-1, our goal is to encode each point using m-dimensional…
Linear regression studies the problem of estimating a model parameter $\beta^* \in \R^p$, from $n$ observations $\{(y_i,x_i)\}_{i=1}^n$ from linear model $y_i = \langle \x_i,\beta^* \rangle + \epsilon_i$. We consider a significant generalization in which the relationship between $\langle x_i,\beta^*…
Latent models are a fundamental modeling tool in machine learning applications, but they present significant computational and analytical challenges. The popular EM algorithm and its variants, is a much used algorithmic tool; yet our rigorous understanding of its performance is highly incomplete. Re…