10 accepted papers
Subword tokenization methods like Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) are widely used in large language models due to their balance of vocabulary compactness and representational power. However, they suffer from inefficiencies in representing rare words and require large embedding matrices. Character-level mod
We address the problem of incremental sequence classification, where predictions are updated as new elements in the sequence are revealed. Drawing on temporal-difference learning from reinforcement learning, we identify a temporal-consistency condition that successive predictions should satisfy. We…
A comparison-based search algorithm lets a user find a target item $t$ in a database by answering queries of the form, “Which of items $i$ and $j$ is closer to $t$?” Instead of formulating an explicit query (such as one or several keywords), the user navigates towards the target via a sequence of su…
Driven by applications in clinical medicine and business, we address the problem of modeling trajectories over multiple states. We build on well-known methods from survival analysis and introduce a family of sequence models based on localized Bayesian Markov chains. We develop inference and predicti…
We study survival analysis in the dynamic setting: We seek to model the time to an event of interest given sequences of states. Taking inspiration from temporal-difference learning, a central idea in reinforcement learning, we develop algorithms that estimate a discrete-time survival model by exploi…
We consider a setting where users interact with a collection of N items on an online platform. We are given class labels possibly corrupted by noise, and we seek to recover the true class of each item. We postulate a simple probabilistic model of the interactions between users and items, based on th…
We consider the problem of finding a target object t using pairwise comparisons, by asking an oracle questions of the form “Which object from the pair (i,j) is more similar to t?”. Objects live in a space of latent features, from which the oracle generates noisy answers. First, we consider the non-b…
Understanding how users navigate in a network is of high interest in many applications. We consider a setting where only aggregate node-level traffic is observed and tackle the task of learning edge transition probabilities. We cast it as a preference learning problem, and we study a model where cho…
We address the problem of learning a ranking by using adaptively chosen pairwise comparisons. Our goal is to recover the ranking accurately but to sample the comparisons sparingly. If all comparison outcomes are consistent with the ranking, the optimal solution is to use an efficient sorting algorit…
We show that the maximum-likelihood (ML) estimate of models derived from Luce's choice axiom (e.g., the Plackett-Luce model) can be expressed as the stationary distribution of a Markov chain. This conveys insight into several recently proposed spectral inference algorithms. We take advantage of this…