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Maximilian Nickel

16 accepted papers

2026

Cultivating Pluralism In Algorithmic Monoculture: The Community Alignment Dataset

ICLR 2026poster

How can large language models (LLMs) serve users with varying preferences that may conflict across cultural, political, or other dimensions? To advance this challenge, this paper establishes four key results. First, we demonstrate, through a large-scale multilingual human study with representative s…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Representative Ranking for Deliberation in the Public Sphere

ICML 2025poster

Online comment sections, such as those on news sites or social media, have the potential to foster informal public deliberation, However, this potential is often undermined by the frequency of toxic or low-quality exchanges that occur in these settings. To combat this, platforms increasingly leverag…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Generalized Schrödinger Bridge Matching

ICLR 2024poster

Modern distribution matching algorithms for training diffusion or flow models directly prescribe the time evolution of the marginal distributions between two boundary distributions. In this work, we consider a generalized distribution matching setup, where these marginals are only implicitly describ…

2024

No Free Delivery Service: Epistemic limits of passive data collection in complex social systems

NeurIPS 2024poster

Rapid model validation via the train-test paradigm has been a key driver for the breathtaking progress in machine learning and AI. However, modern AI systems often depend on a combination of tasks and data collection practices that violate all assumptions ensuring test validity. Yet, without rigorou…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

Flow Matching for Generative Modeling

ICLR 2023top-25%

We introduce a new paradigm for generative modeling built on Continuous Normalizing Flows (CNFs), allowing us to train CNFs at unprecedented scale. Specifically, we present the notion of Flow Matching (FM), a simulation-free approach for training CNFs based on regressing vector fields of fixed condi…

Cited by 1222SourcePDFScholar
2023

Hyperbolic Image-text Representations

ICML 2023poster

Visual and linguistic concepts naturally organize themselves in a hierarchy, where a textual concept "dog" entails all images that contain dogs. Despite being intuitive, current large-scale vision and language models such as CLIP do not explicitly capture such hierarchy. We propose MERU, a contrasti…

2023

Neural FIM for learning Fisher information metrics from point cloud data

ICML 2023poster

Although data diffusion embeddings are ubiquitous in unsupervised learning and have proven to be a viable technique for uncovering the underlying intrinsic geometry of data, diffusion embeddings are inherently limited due to their discrete nature. To this end, we propose neural FIM, a method for com…

2023

On Kinetic Optimal Probability Paths for Generative Models

ICML 2023poster

Recent successful generative models are trained by fitting a neural network to an a-priori defined tractable probability density path taking noise to training examples. In this paper we investigate the space of Gaussian probability paths, which includes diffusion paths as an instance, and look for a…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2022

Semi-Discrete Normalizing Flows through Differentiable Tessellation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Mapping between discrete and continuous distributions is a difficult task and many have had to resort to heuristical approaches. We propose a tessellation-based approach that directly learns quantization boundaries in a continuous space, complete with exact likelihood evaluations. This is done throu…

2021

Learning Neural Event Functions for Ordinary Differential Equations

ICLR 2021poster

The existing Neural ODE formulation relies on an explicit knowledge of the termination time. We extend Neural ODEs to implicitly defined termination criteria modeled by neural event functions, which can be chained together and differentiated through. Neural Event ODEs are capable of modeling discret…

2021

Moser Flow: Divergence-based Generative Modeling on Manifolds

NeurIPS 2021oral

We are interested in learning generative models for complex geometries described via manifolds, such as spheres, tori, and other implicit surfaces. Current extensions of existing (Euclidean) generative models are restricted to specific geometries and typically suffer from high computational costs.…

2019

Task-Driven Modular Networks for Zero-Shot Compositional Learning

ICCV 2019poster

One of the hallmarks of human intelligence is the ability to compose learned knowledge into novel concepts which can be recognized without a single training example. In contrast, current state-of-the-art methods require hundreds of training examples for each possible category to build reliable and a…

Cited by 219PDFScholar
2018

Separating Self-Expression and Visual Content in Hashtag Supervision

CVPR 2018poster

The variety, abundance, and structured nature of hashtags make them an interesting data source for training vision models. For instance, hashtags have the potential to significantly reduce the problem of manual supervision and annotation when learning vision models for a large number of concepts. Ho…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar