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John Patrick Cunningham

13 accepted papers

2026

Variational Deep Learning via Implicit Regularization

ICLR 2026poster

Modern deep learning models generalize remarkably well in-distribution, despite being overparametrized and trained with little to no explicit regularization. Instead, current theory credits implicit regularization imposed by the choice of architecture, hyperparameters and optimization procedure. How…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Theoretical Limitations of Ensembles in the Age of Overparameterization

ICML 2025oral

Classic ensembles generalize better than any single component model. In contrast, recent empirical studies find that modern ensembles of (overparameterized) neural networks may not provide any inherent generalization advantage over single but larger neural networks. This paper clarifies how modern o…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Approximation-Aware Bayesian Optimization

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

High-dimensional Bayesian optimization (BO) tasks such as molecular design often require $>10,$$000$ function evaluations before obtaining meaningful results. While methods like sparse variational Gaussian processes (SVGPs) reduce computational requirements in these settings, the underlying approxim…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Computation-Aware Gaussian Processes: Model Selection And Linear-Time Inference

NeurIPS 2024poster

Model selection in Gaussian processes scales prohibitively with the size of the training dataset, both in time and memory. While many approximations exist, all incur inevitable approximation error. Recent work accounts for this error in the form of computational uncertainty, which enables---at the c…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Estimating the Hallucination Rate of Generative AI

NeurIPS 2024poster

This paper presents a method for estimating the hallucination rate for in-context learning (ICL) with generative AI. In ICL, a conditional generative model (CGM) is prompted with a dataset and a prediction question and asked to generate a response. One interpretation of ICL assumes that the CGM comp…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Practical and Asymptotically Exact Conditional Sampling in Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

Diffusion models have been successful on a range of conditional generation tasks including molecular design and text-to-image generation. However, these achievements have primarily depended on task-specific conditional training or error-prone heuristic approximations. Ideally, a conditional generati…

2022

Data Augmentation for Compositional Data: Advancing Predictive Models of the Microbiome

NeurIPS 2022accept

Data augmentation plays a key role in modern machine learning pipelines. While numerous augmentation strategies have been studied in the context of computer vision and natural language processing, less is known for other data modalities. Our work extends the success of data augmentation to compositi…

2022

Deep Ensembles Work, But Are They Necessary?

NeurIPS 2022accept

Ensembling neural networks is an effective way to increase accuracy, and can often match the performance of individual larger models. This observation poses a natural question: given the choice between a deep ensemble and a single neural network with similar accuracy, is one preferable over the othe…

2022

Posterior and Computational Uncertainty in Gaussian Processes

NeurIPS 2022accept

Gaussian processes scale prohibitively with the size of the dataset. In response, many approximation methods have been developed, which inevitably introduce approximation error. This additional source of uncertainty, due to limited computation, is entirely ignored when using the approximate posterio…

2021

Rectangular Flows for Manifold Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

Normalizing flows are invertible neural networks with tractable change-of-volume terms, which allow optimization of their parameters to be efficiently performed via maximum likelihood. However, data of interest are typically assumed to live in some (often unknown) low-dimensional manifold embedded i…

2021

The Limitations of Large Width in Neural Networks: A Deep Gaussian Process Perspective

NeurIPS 2021poster

Large width limits have been a recent focus of deep learning research: modulo computational practicalities, do wider networks outperform narrower ones? Answering this question has been challenging, as conventional networks gain representational power with width, potentially masking any negative effe…