38 accepted papers
Understanding the dynamics of feature learning in neural networks (NNs) remains a significant challenge. The work of (Mousavi-Hosseini et al., 2023) analyzes a multiple index teacher-student setting and shows that a two-layer student attains a low-rank structure in its first-layer weights when tra…
To maximize hardware utilization, modern machine learning systems typically employ large constant or manually tuned batch size schedules, relying on heuristics that are brittle and costly to tune. Existing adaptive strategies based on gradient noise scale (GNS) offer a principled alternative. Howeve…
Next-token prediction (NTP) has driven the success of large language models (LLMs), but it struggles with long-horizon reasoning, planning, and creative writing, with these limitations largely attributed to teacher-forced training. Multi-token prediction (MTP) partially mitigates these issues by pre…
Model merging has emerged as an efficient and flexible paradigm for multi-task learning, with numerous methods being proposed in recent years. However, these state-of-the-art techniques are typically evaluated on benchmark suites that are highly favorable to model merging, and their robustness in m…
Noise-based certified machine unlearning currently faces a hard ceiling: the noise magnitude required to certify unlearning typically destroys model utility, particularly for large-scale deletion requests. While leveraging public data is a standard technique in differential privacy to relax this ten…
Compositional generalization is a crucial step towards developing data-efficient intelligent machines that generalize in human-like ways. In this work, we tackle a challenging form of distribution shift, termed compositional shift, where some attribute combinations are completely absent at training…
Deep learning has proven to be effective in a wide variety of loss minimization problems. However, many applications of interest, like minimizing projected Bellman error and min-max optimization, cannot be modelled as minimizing a scalar loss function but instead correspond to solving a variational…
Despite its widespread adoption, Adam's advantage over Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) lacks a comprehensive theoretical explanation. This paper investigates Adam's sensitivity to rotations of the parameter space. We observe that Adam's performance in training transformers degrades under random ro…
We study the problem of model selection in causal inference, specifically for conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation. Unlike machine learning, there is no perfect analogue of cross-validation for model selection as we do not observe the counterfactual potential outcomes. Towards this…
Deployed machine learning systems require some mechanism to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. Existing research mainly focuses on one type of distribution shift: detecting samples from novel classes, absent from the training set. However, real-world systems encounter a broad variety of anomal…
Understanding the optimization dynamics of neural networks is necessary for closing the gap between theory and practice. Stochastic first-order optimization algorithms are known to efficiently locate favorable minima in deep neural networks. This efficiency, however, contrasts with the non-convex an…
This work studies an algorithm, which we call magnetic mirror descent, that is inspired by mirror descent and the non-Euclidean proximal gradient algorithm. Our contribution is demonstrating the virtues of magnetic mirror descent as both an equilibrium solver and as an approach to reinforcement lear…
We tackle the problems of latent variables identification and "out-of-support'' image generation in representation learning. We show that both are possible for a class of decoders that we call additive, which are reminiscent of decoders used for object-centric representation learning (OCRL) and well…
Handling out-of-distribution (OOD) samples has become a major stake in the real-world deployment of machine learning systems. This work explores the use of self-supervised contrastive learning to the simultaneous detection of two types of OOD samples: unseen classes and adversarial perturbations. Fi…
We study the problem of training a two-layer neural network (NN) of arbitrary width using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) where the input $\boldsymbol{x}\in \mathbb{R}^d$ is Gaussian and the target $y \in \mathbb{R}$ follows a multiple-index model, i.e., $y=g(\langle\boldsymbol{u_1},\boldsymbol{x}…
Performative prediction is a framework for learning models that influence the data they intend to predict. We focus on finding classifiers that are performatively stable, i.e. optimal for the data distribution they induce. Standard convergence results for finding a performatively stable classifier w…
Although disentangled representations are often said to be beneficial for downstream tasks, current empirical and theoretical understanding is limited. In this work, we provide evidence that disentangled representations coupled with sparse task-specific predictors improve generalization. In the cont…
The study of first-order optimization is sensitive to the assumptions made on the objective functions. These assumptions induce complexity classes which play a key role in worst-case analysis, including the fundamental concept of algorithm optimality. Recent work argues that strong convexity and smo…
In this work we introduce a new framework for the theoretical study of convergence and tuning of first-order optimization algorithms (FOA). The study of such algorithms typically requires assumptions on the objective functions: the most popular ones are probably smoothness and strong convexity. Thes…
Denoising Score Matching with Annealed Langevin Sampling (DSM-ALS) has recently found success in generative modeling. The approach works by first training a neural network to estimate the score of a distribution, and then using Langevin dynamics to sample from the data distribution assumed by the sc…
The invariance principle from causality is at the heart of notable approaches such as invariant risk minimization (IRM) that seek to address out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization failures. Despite the promising theory, invariance principle-based approaches fail in common classification tasks, whe…
Two of the most prominent algorithms for solving unconstrained smooth games are the classical stochastic gradient descent-ascent (SGDA) and the recently introduced stochastic consensus optimization (SCO) [Mescheder et al., 2017]. SGDA is known to converge to a stationary point for specific classes o…
We consider differentiable games where the goal is to find a Nash equilibrium. The machine learning community has recently started using variants of the gradient method (GD). Prime examples are extragradient (EG), the optimistic gradient method (OG) and consensus optimization (CO) which enjoy linear…
We use matrix iteration theory to characterize acceleration in smooth games. We define the spectral shape of a family of games as the set containing all eigenvalues of the Jacobians of standard gradient dynamics in the family. Shapes restricted to the real line represent well-understood classes of p…
One of the principal scientific challenges in deep learning is explaining generalization, i.e., why the particular way the community now trains networks to achieve small training error also leads to small error on held-out data from the same population. It is widely appreciated that some worst-case…
Recent successes of game-theoretic formulations in ML have caused a resurgence of research interest in differentiable games. Overwhelmingly, that research focuses on methods and upper bounds on their speed of convergence. In this work, we approach the question of fundamental iteration complexity by…
The success of adversarial formulations in machine learning has brought renewed motivation for smooth games. In this work, we focus on the class of stochastic Hamiltonian methods and provide the first convergence guarantees for certain classes of stochastic smooth games. We propose a novel unbiased…
Deep neural networks excel at learning the training data, but often provide incorrect and confident predictions when evaluated on slightly different test examples. This includes distribution shifts, outliers, and adversarial examples. To address these issues, we propose \manifoldmixup{}, a simple re…
Recent literature has demonstrated promising results for training Generative Adversarial Networks by employing a set of discriminators, in contrast to the traditional game involving one generator against a single adversary. Such methods perform single-objective optimization on some simple consolidat…
Games generalize the single-objective optimization paradigm by introducing different objective functions for different players. Differentiable games often proceed by simultaneous or alternating gradient updates. In machine learning, games are gaining new importance through formulations like generati…
Most stochastic optimization methods use gradients once before discarding them. While variance reduction methods have shown that reusing past gradients can be beneficial when there is a finite number of datapoints, they do not easily extend to the online setting. One issue is the staleness due to us…
Machine learning promises methods that generalize well from finite labeled data. However, the brittleness of existing neural net approaches is revealed by notable failures, such as the existence of adversarial examples that are misclassified despite being nearly identical to a training example, or t…
Recurrent neural networks are known for their notorious exploding and vanishing gradient problem (EVGP). This problem becomes more evident in tasks where the information needed to correctly solve them exist over long time scales, because EVGP prevents important gradient components from being back-pr…
Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most powerful tools for analyzing matrices in machine learning. In this paper, we study methods to accelerate power iteration in the stochastic setting by adding a momentum term. While in the deterministic setting, power iteration with momentum has op…
Three-dimensional geometric data offer an excellent domain for studying representation learning and generative modeling. In this paper, we look at geometric data represented as point clouds. We introduce a deep autoencoder (AE) network with excellent reconstruction quality and generalization ability…
Three-dimensional geometric data offer an excellent domain for studying representation learning and generative modeling. In this paper, we look at geometric data represented as point clouds. We introduce a deep AutoEncoder (AE) network with state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and generalization…
The pairwise influence matrix of Dobrushin has long been used as an analytical tool to bound the rate of convergence of Gibbs sampling. In this work, we use Dobrushin influence as the basis of a practical tool to certify and efficiently improve the quality of a Gibbs sampler. Our Dobrushin-optimized…
Gibbs sampling is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling technique that iteratively samples variables from their conditional distributions. There are two common scan orders for the variables: random scan and systematic scan. Due to the benefits of locality in hardware, systematic scan is commonly used,…