9 accepted papers
We propose a new ``bi-metric'' framework for designing nearest neighbor data structures. Our framework assumes two dissimilarity functions: a ground-truth metric that is accurate but expensive to compute, and a proxy metric that is cheaper but less accurate. In both theory and practice, we show how …
The widely used retrieve-and-rerank pipeline faces two critical limitations: they are constrained by the initial retrieval quality of the top-k documents, and the growing computational demands of LLM-based rerankers restrict the number of documents that can be effectively processed. We introduce Rer…
This paper studies the use of *kernel density estimation* (KDE) for linear algebraic tasks involving the *kernel matrix* of a collection of $n$ data points in $\mathbb{R}^d$. In particular, we improve upon the best existing algorithms for computing the following up to $(1+\varepsilon)$ relative erro…
Contradiction retrieval refers to identifying and extracting documents that explicitly disagree with or refute the content of a query, which is important to many downstream applications like fact checking and data cleaning. To retrieve contradiction argument to the query from large document corpora,…
Nearest neighbor search is a fundamental data structure problem with many applications. Although the main objective of the data structure is to quickly report data points that are closest to a given query, it has long been noted that without additional constraints the reported answers can be redunda…
We study the density estimation problem defined as follows: given $k$ distributions $p_1, \ldots, p_k$ over a discrete domain $[n]$, as well as a collection of samples chosen from a "query" distribution $q$ over $[n]$, output $p_i$ that is "close" to $q$. Recently Aamand et al. gave the first and o…
Generative modeling has been the dominant approach for large-scale pretraining and zero-shot generalization. In this work, we challenge this convention by showing that discriminative approaches perform substantially better than generative ones on a large number of NLP tasks. Technically, we train a…
Graph-based approaches to nearest neighbor search are popular and powerful tools for handling large datasets in practice, but they have limited theoretical guarantees. We study the worst-case performance of recent graph-based approximate nearest neighbor search algorithms, such as HNSW, NSG and Dis…
We consider the stochastic combinatorial semi-bandit problem with adversarial corruptions. We provide a simple combinatorial algorithm that can achieve a regret of $\tilde{O}\left(C+d^2K/\Delta_{min}\right)$ where $C$ is the total amount of corruptions, $d$ is the maximal number of arms one can play…