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Matthew J Johnson

6 accepted papers

2022

Unified Scaling Laws for Routed Language Models

ICML 2022oral

The performance of a language model has been shown to be effectively modeled as a power-law in its parameter count. Here we study the scaling behaviors of Routing Networks: architectures that conditionally use only a subset of their parameters while processing an input. For these models, parameter c…

2020

Learning Differential Equations that are Easy to Solve

NeurIPS 2020poster

Differential equations parameterized by neural networks become expensive to solve numerically as training progresses. We propose a remedy that encourages learned dynamics to be easier to solve. Specifically, we introduce a differentiable surrogate for the time cost of standard numerical solvers, usi…

2019

The LORACs Prior for VAEs: Letting the Trees Speak for the Data

AISTATS 2019poster

In variational autoencoders, the prior on the latent codes $z$ is often treated as an afterthought, but the prior shapes the kind of latent representation that the model learns. If the goal is to learn a representation that is interpretable and useful, then the prior should reflect the ways in which…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2018

Autoconj: Recognizing and Exploiting Conjugacy Without a Domain-Specific Language

NeurIPS 2018poster

Deriving conditional and marginal distributions using conjugacy relationships can be time consuming and error prone. In this paper, we propose a strategy for automating such derivations. Unlike previous systems which focus on relationships between pairs of random variables, our system (which we call…

2016

Composing graphical models with neural networks for structured representations and fast inference

NeurIPS 2016poster

We propose a general modeling and inference framework that combines the complementary strengths of probabilistic graphical models and deep learning methods. Our model family composes latent graphical models with neural network observation likelihoods. For inference, we use recognition networks to pr…

2015

Dependent Multinomial Models Made Easy: Stick-Breaking with the Polya-gamma Augmentation

NeurIPS 2015poster

Many practical modeling problems involve discrete data that are best represented as draws from multinomial or categorical distributions. For example, nucleotides in a DNA sequence, children's names in a given state and year, and text documents are all commonly modeled with multinomial distributions.…