23 accepted papers
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their outputs can sometimes be unreliable or factually incorrect. To address this, we introduce Self Logits Evolution Decoding (SLED), a novel decoding framework that enhances the truthfulness of LLMs without relying on exte…
In real-world systems, models are frequently updated as more data becomes available, and in addition to achieving high accuracy, the goal is to also maintain a low difference in predictions compared to the base model (i.e. predictive churn). If model retraining results in vastly different behavior,…
Self-supervised contrastive representation learning has proved incredibly successful in the vision and natural language domains, enabling state-of-the-art performance with orders of magnitude less labeled data. However, such methods are domain-specific and little has been done to leverage this techn…
We analyze the problem of active covering, where the learner is given an unlabeled dataset and can sequentially label query examples. The objective is to label query all of the positive examples in the fewest number of total label queries. We show under standard non-parametric assumptions that a cla…
Learning under one-sided feedback (i.e., where we only observe the labels for examples we predicted positively on) is a fundamental problem in machine learning – applications include lending and recommendation systems. Despite this, there has been surprisingly little progress made in ways to mitigat…
Training modern neural networks is an inherently noisy process that can lead to high \emph{prediction churn}– disagreements between re-trainings of the same model due to factors such as randomization in the parameter initialization and mini-batches– even when the trained models all attain similar ac…
MeanShift is a popular mode-seeking clustering algorithm used in a wide range of applications in machine learning. However, it is known to be prohibitively slow, with quadratic runtime per iteration. We propose MeanShift++, an extremely fast mode-seeking algorithm based on MeanShift that uses a grid…
Mode estimation is a classical problem in statistics with a wide range of applications in machine learning. Despite this, there is little understanding in its robustness properties under possibly adversarial data contamination. In this paper, we give precise robustness guarantees as well as privacy…
We study a constrained contextual linear bandit setting, where the goal of the agent is to produce a sequence of policies, whose expected cumulative reward over the course of multiple rounds is maximum, and each one of them has an expected cost below a certain threshold. We propose an upper-confiden…
Modern machine learning models are often trained on examples with noisy labels that hurt performance and are hard to identify. In this paper, we provide an empirical study showing that a simple $k$-nearest neighbor-based filtering approach on the logit layer of a preliminary model can remove mislabe…
DBSCAN is a popular density-based clustering algorithm. It computes the $\epsilon$-neighborhood graph of a dataset and uses the connected components of the high-degree nodes to decide the clusters. However, the full neighborhood graph may be too costly to compute with a worst-case complexity of $O(n…
Datasets often contain biases which unfairly disadvantage certain groups, and classifiers trained on such datasets can inherit these biases. In this paper, we provide a mathematical formulation of how this bias can arise. We do so by assuming the existence of underlying, unknown, and unbiased labels…
DBSCAN is a classical density-based clustering procedure with tremendous practical relevance. However, DBSCAN implicitly needs to compute the empirical density for each sample point, leading to a quadratic worst-case time complexity, which is too slow on large datasets. We propose DBSCAN++, a simple…
Despite the practical relevance of density-based clustering algorithms, there is little understanding in its statistical robustness properties under possibly adversarial contamination of the input data. We show both robustness and consistency guarantees for a simple modification of the popular DBSCA…
Set functions predict a label from a permutation-invariant variable-size collection of feature vectors. We propose making set functions more understandable and regularized by capturing domain knowledge through shape constraints. We show how prior work in monotonic constraints can be adapted to set f…
Classifiers can be trained with data-dependent constraints to satisfy fairness goals, reduce churn, achieve a targeted false positive rate, or other policy goals. We study the generalization performance for such constrained optimization problems, in terms of how well the constraints are satisfied at…
We propose an approach to fair classification that enforces independence between the classifier outputs and sensitive information by minimizing Wasserstein-1 distances. The approach has desirable theoretical properties and is robust to specific choices of the threshold used to obtain class predictio…
We provide initial seedings to the Quick Shift clustering algorithm, which approximate the locally high-density regions of the data. Such seedings act as more stable and expressive cluster-cores than the singleton modes found by Quick Shift. We establish statistical consistency guarantees for this m…
Knowing when a classifier's prediction can be trusted is useful in many applications and critical for safely using AI. While the bulk of the effort in machine learning research has been towards improving classifier performance, understanding when a classifier's predictions should and should not be t…
We show that DBSCAN can estimate the connected components of the $\lambda$-density level set $\{ x : f(x) \ge \lambda\}$ given $n$ i.i.d. samples from an unknown density $f$. We characterize the regularity of the level set boundaries using parameter $\beta > 0$ and analyze the estimation error under…
We present a procedure that can estimate – with statistical consistency guarantees – any local-maxima of a density, under benign distributional conditions. The procedure estimates all such local maxima, or modal-sets, of any bounded shape or dimension, including usual point-modes. In practice, modal…
Quick Shift is a popular mode-seeking and clustering algorithm. We present finite sample statistical consistency guarantees for Quick Shift on mode and cluster recovery under mild distributional assumptions. We then apply our results to construct a consistent modal regression algorithm.
Kernel density estimation (KDE) is a popular nonparametric density estimation method. We (1) derive finite-sample high-probability density estimation bounds for multivariate KDE under mild density assumptions which hold uniformly in $x \in \mathbb{R}^d$ and bandwidth matrices. We apply these results…