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Gael Varoquaux

22 accepted papers

2026

TabICooL: A better, faster, scalable, and open tabular foundation model

ICML 2026poster

Tabular foundation models, such as TabPFNv2 and TabICL, have recently dethroned gradient-boosted trees at the top of predictive benchmarks, demonstrating the value of in-context learning for tabular data. We introduce TabICooL, a new state-of-the-art foundation model for regression and classificatio…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Tailoring Strictly Proper Scoring Rules for Downstream Tasks: An Application to Causal Inference

ICML 2026poster

Probabilistic models are typically trained using task-agnostic objectives like log-loss, which can lead to significant errors in downstream estimation. This disconnect is especially critical in Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) for causal inference, where propensity score errors near $0$ and $1$ o…

Cited by 1SourceScholar
2025

Decision from Suboptimal Classifiers: Excess Risk Pre- and Post-Calibration

AISTATS 2025poster

Probabilistic classifiers are central for making informed decisions under uncertainty. Based on the maximum expected utility principle, optimal decision rules can be derived using the posterior class probabilities and misclassification costs. Yet, in practice only learned approximations of the oracl…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Survival Models: Proper Scoring Rule and Stochastic Optimization with Competing Risks

AISTATS 2025poster

When dealing with right-censored data, where some outcomes are missing due to a limited observation period, survival analysis —known as *time-to-event analysis*— focuses on predicting the time until an event of interest occurs. Multiple classes of outcomes lead to a classification variant: predictin…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Beyond calibration: estimating the grouping loss of modern neural networks

ICLR 2023poster

The ability to ensure that a classifier gives reliable confidence scores is essential to ensure informed decision-making. To this end, recent work has focused on miscalibration, i.e., the over or under confidence of model scores. Yet calibration is not enough: even a perfectly calibrated classifier…

2022

Imputing Out-of-Vocabulary Embeddings with LOVE Makes LanguageModels Robust with Little Cost

ACL 2022long

State-of-the-art NLP systems represent inputs with word embeddings, but these are brittle when faced with Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) words. To address this issue, we follow the principle of mimick-like models to generate vectors for unseen words, by learning the behavior of pre-trained embeddings using…

2022

Why do tree-based models still outperform deep learning on typical tabular data?

NeurIPS 2022accept

While deep learning has enabled tremendous progress on text and image datasets, its superiority on tabular data is not clear. We contribute extensive benchmarks of standard and novel deep learning methods as well as tree-based models such as XGBoost and Random Forests, across a large number of datas…

Cited by 1657SourcePDFScholar
2021

What’s a good imputation to predict with missing values?

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

How to learn a good predictor on data with missing values? Most efforts focus on first imputing as well as possible and second learning on the completed data to predict the outcome. Yet, this widespread practice has no theoretical grounding. Here we show that for almost all imputation functions, an…

2020

Linear predictor on linearly-generated data with missing values: non consistency and solutions

AISTATS 2020poster

We consider building predictors when the data have missing values. We study the seemingly-simple case where the target to predict is a linear function of the fully observed data and we show that, in the presence of missing values, the optimal predictor is not linear in general. In the particular Gau…

2020

NeuMiss networks: differentiable programming for supervised learning with missing values.

NeurIPS 2020oral

The presence of missing values makes supervised learning much more challenging. Indeed, previous work has shown that even when the response is a linear function of the complete data, the optimal predictor is a complex function of the observed entries and the missingness indicator. As a result, the c…

2019

Comparing distributions: $\ell_1$ geometry improves kernel two-sample testing

NeurIPS 2019spotlight

Are two sets of observations drawn from the same distribution? This problem is a two-sample test. Kernel methods lead to many appealing properties. Indeed state-of-the-art approaches use the $L^2$ distance between kernel-based distribution representatives to derive their test statistics. Here, we s…

2019

Feature Grouping as a Stochastic Regularizer for High-Dimensional Structured Data

ICML 2019oral

In many applications where collecting data is expensive, for example neuroscience or medical imaging, the sample size is typically small compared to the feature dimension. These datasets call for intelligent regularization that exploits known structure, such as correlations between the features aris…

2019

Manifold-regression to predict from MEG/EEG brain signals without source modeling

NeurIPS 2019poster

Magnetoencephalography and electroencephalography (M/EEG) can reveal neuronal dynamics non-invasively in real-time and are therefore appreciated methods in medicine and neuroscience. Recent advances in modeling brain-behavior relationships have highlighted the effectiveness of Riemannian geometry fo…

2017

Learning Neural Representations of Human Cognition across Many fMRI Studies

NeurIPS 2017poster

Cognitive neuroscience is enjoying rapid increase in extensive public brain-imaging datasets. It opens the door to large-scale statistical models. Finding a unified perspective for all available data calls for scalable and automated solutions to an old challenge: how to aggregate heterogeneous infor…

2017

Learning to Discover Sparse Graphical Models

ICML 2017poster

We consider structure discovery of undirected graphical models from observational data. Inferring likely structures from few examples is a complex task often requiring the formulation of priors and sophisticated inference procedures. Popular methods rely on estimating a penalized maximum likelihood…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar
2016

Dictionary Learning for Massive Matrix Factorization

ICML 2016poster

Sparse matrix factorization is a popular tool to obtain interpretable data decompositions, which are also effective to perform data completion or denoising. Its applicability to large datasets has been addressed with online and randomized methods, that reduce the complexity in one of the matrix dime…

2016

Learning brain regions via large-scale online structured sparse dictionary learning

NeurIPS 2016poster

We propose a multivariate online dictionary-learning method for obtaining decompositions of brain images with structured and sparse components (aka atoms). Sparsity is to be understood in the usual sense: the dictionary atoms are constrained to contain mostly zeros. This is imposed via an $\ell_1$-n…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2015

Semi-Supervised Factored Logistic Regression for High-Dimensional Neuroimaging Data

NeurIPS 2015poster

Imaging neuroscience links human behavior to aspects of brain biology in ever-increasing datasets. Existing neuroimaging methods typically perform either discovery of unknown neural structure or testing of neural structure associated with mental tasks. However, testing hypotheses on the neural corre…