37 accepted papers
Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) offer a fast and flexible alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for discrete sequence generation by performing iterative denoising with parallel updates. Despite these advantages, dLLMs are commonly evaluated using metrics developed for ARMs. Such eva…
Diffusion Posterior Sampling (DPS) provides a principled Bayesian approach to inverse problems by sampling from $p(x_0 \mid y)$. While posterior sampling is valuable for capturing uncertainty and multi-modality, many classical and practical inverse problem settings ultimately prioritize accurate poi…
Diffusion bridge models and stochastic interpolants enable high-quality image-to-image (I2I) translation by creating paths between distributions in pixel space. However, recent diffusion bridge models excel in image translation but suffer from restricted design flexibility and complicated hyperparam…
This work explores unifying knowledge enhanced recommendation with multi-domain recommendation systems in a conversational AI assistant application. Multi-domain recommendation leverages users’ interactions in previous domains to improve recommendations in a new one. Knowledge graph enhancement seek…
The widespread use of Text-to-Image (T2I) models in content generation requires careful examination of their safety, including their robustness to adversarial attacks. Despite extensive research on adversarial attacks, the reasons for their effectiveness remain underexplored. This paper presents an…
Denoising diffusion models enable conditional generation and density modeling of complex relationships like images and text. However, the nature of the learned relationships is opaque making it difficult to understand precisely what relationships between words and parts of an image are captured, or…
Quantifying the degree of similarity between images is a key copyright issue for image-based machine learning. In legal doctrine however determining the degree of similarity between works requires subjective analysis and fact-finders (judges and juries) can demonstrate considerable variability in th…
A largely unaddressed problem in causal inference is that of learning reliable policies in continuous, high-dimensional treatment variables from observational data. Especially in the presence of strong confounding, it can be infeasible to learn the entire heterogeneous response surface from treatmen…
Diffusion models learn to denoise data and the trained denoiser is then used to generate new samples from the data distribution. In this paper, we revisit the diffusion sampling process and identify a fundamental cause of sample quality degradation: the denoiser is poorly estimated in regions that…
Denoising diffusion models have spurred significant gains in density modeling and image generation, precipitating an industrial revolution in text-guided AI art generation. We introduce a new mathematical foundation for diffusion models inspired by classic results in information theory that connect…
Efficient finetuning of pretrained language transformers is becoming increasingly prevalent for solving natural language processing tasks. While effective, it can still require a large number of tunable parameters. This can be a drawback for low-resource applications and training with differential-p…
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are becoming integral components of real world services relied upon by millions of users. Unfortunately, architects of these systems can find it difficult to ensure reliable performance as irrelevant details like random initialization can unexpectedly change the outputs o…
Parameter-efficient tuning (PET) methods fit pre-trained language models (PLMs) to downstream tasks by either computing a small compressed update for a subset of model parameters, or appending and fine-tuning a small number of new model parameters to the pre-trained network. Hand-designed PET archit…
Inferring causal effects of continuous-valued treatments from observational data is a crucial task promising to better inform policy- and decision-makers. A critical assumption needed to identify these effects is that all confounding variables—causal parents of both the treatment and the outcome—are…
Domain generalization algorithms use training data from multiple domains to learn models that generalize well to unseen domains. While recently proposed benchmarks demonstrate that most of the existing algorithms do not outperform simple baselines, the established evaluation methods fail to expose t…
Mutual information (MI) is a fundamental quantity in information theory and machine learning. However, direct estimation of MI is intractable, even if the true joint probability density for the variables of interest is known, as it involves estimating a potentially high-dimensional log partition fun…
Language models excel at generating coherent text, and model compression techniques such as knowledge distillation have enabled their use in resource-constrained settings. However, these models can be biased in multiple ways, including the unfounded association of male and female genders with gender…
Knowledge graphs (KGs) often represent knowledge bases that are incomplete. Machine learning models can alleviate this by helping automate graph completion. Recently, there has been growing interest in completing knowledge bases that are dynamic, where previously unseen entities may be added to the…
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) models in industry applications are usually trained offline on historic data, but have to perform well on incoming user requests after deployment. Since the application data is not available at training time, this is formally similar to the domain generalization p…
Controlling bias in training datasets is vital for ensuring equal treatment, or parity, between different groups in downstream applications. A naive solution is to transform the data so that it is statistically independent of group membership, but this may throw away too much information when a reas…
Graph Representation Learning (GRL) methods have impacted fields from chemistry to social science. However, their algorithmic implementations are specialized to specific use-cases e.g. "message passing" methods are run differently from "node embedding" ones. Despite their apparent differences, all t…
Sampling from an unnormalized probability distribution is a fundamental problem in machine learning with applications including Bayesian modeling, latent factor inference, and energy-based model training. After decades of research, variations of MCMC remain the default approach to sampling despite s…
Recent improvements in the performance of state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods for Graph Representational Learning (GRL) have come at the cost of significant computational resource requirements for training, e.g., for calculating gradients via backprop over many data epochs. Meanwhile, Singular Value Dec…
Methods of neural network attribution have emerged out of a necessity for explanation and accountability in the predictions of black-box neural models. Most approaches use a variation of sensitivity analysis, where individual input variables are perturbed and the downstream effects on some output me…
We derive information-theoretic generalization bounds for supervised learning algorithms based on the information contained in predictions rather than in the output of the training algorithm. These bounds improve over the existing information-theoretic bounds, are applicable to a wider range of algo…
Many common machine learning methods involve the geometric annealing path, a sequence of intermediate densities between two distributions of interest constructed using the geometric average. While alternatives such as the moment-averaging path have demonstrated performance gains in some settings, th…
The recently proposed Thermodynamic Variational Objective (TVO) leverages thermodynamic integration to provide a family of variational inference objectives, which both tighten and generalize the ubiquitous Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). However, the tightness of TVO bounds was not previously known, an…
In the presence of noisy or incorrect labels, neural networks have the undesirable tendency to memorize information about the noise. Standard regularization techniques such as dropout, weight decay or data augmentation sometimes help, but do not prevent this behavior. If one considers neural network…
Advances in unsupervised learning enable reconstruction and generation of samples from complex distributions, but this success is marred by the inscrutability of the representations learned. We propose an information-theoretic approach to characterizing disentanglement and dependence in representati…
Compression is at the heart of effective representation learning. However, lossy compression is typically achieved through simple parametric models like Gaussian noise to preserve analytic tractability, and the limitations this imposes on learning are largely unexplored. Further, the Gaussian prior…
Estimating graphical model structure from high-dimensional and undersampled data is a fundamental problem in many scientific fields. Existing approaches, such as GLASSO, latent variable GLASSO, and latent tree models, suffer from high computational complexity and may impose unrealistic sparsity prio…
Existing popular methods for semi-supervised learning with Graph Neural Networks (such as the Graph Convolutional Network) provably cannot learn a general class of neighborhood mixing relationships. To address this weakness, we propose a new model, MixHop, that can learn these relationships, includi…
Representations of data that are invariant to changes in specified factors are useful for a wide range of problems: removing potential biases in prediction problems, controlling the effects of covariates, and disentangling meaningful factors of variation. Unfortunately, learning representations that…
We introduce a new framework for unsupervised learning of representations based on a novel hierarchical decomposition of information. Intuitively, data is passed through a series of progressively fine-grained sieves. Each layer of the sieve recovers a single latent factor that is maximally informati…
Feature selection is one of the most fundamental problems in machine learning. An extensive body of work on information-theoretic feature selection exists which is based on maximizing mutual information between subsets of features and class labels. Practical methods are forced to rely on approximati…
We demonstrate that a popular class of non-parametric mutual information (MI) estimators based on k-nearest-neighbor graphs requires number of samples that scales exponentially with the true MI. Consequently, accurate estimation of MI between two strongly dependent variables is possible only for pro…
We consider a set of probabilistic functions of some input variables as a representation of the inputs. We present bounds on how informative a representation is about input data. We extend these bounds to hierarchical representations so that we can quantify the contribution of each layer towards c…