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Michael Boratko

17 accepted papers

2026

On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval

ICLR 2026poster

Vector embeddings have been tasked with an ever-increasing set of retrieval tasks over the years, with a nascent rise in using them for reasoning, instruction-following, coding, and more. These new benchmarks push embeddings to work for any query and any notion of relevance that could be given. Whil…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

A Geometric Approach to Personalized Recommendation with Set-Theoretic Constraints Using Box Embeddings

ICML 2025poster

Personalized item recommendation typically suffers from data sparsity, which is most often addressed by learning vector representations of users and items via low-rank matrix factorization. While this effectively densifies the matrix by assuming users and movies can be represented by linearly depend…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

LOFT: Scalable and More Realistic Long-Context Evaluation

NAACL 2025findings

Long-context language models (LCLMs) have the potential to revolutionize our approach to tasks traditionally reliant on external tools like retrieval systems or databases. Leveraging LCLMs’ ability to natively ingest and process entire corpora of information offers numerous advantages. It enhances u…

2024

A Fresh Take on Stale Embeddings: Improving Dense Retriever Training with Corrector Networks

ICML 2024poster

In dense retrieval, deep encoders provide embeddings for both inputs and targets, and the softmax function is used to parameterize a distribution over a large number of candidate targets (e.g., textual passages for information retrieval). Significant challenges arise in training such encoders in the…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Every Answer Matters: Evaluating Commonsense with Probabilistic Measures

ACL 2024long

Large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on commonsense tasks; however, these tasks are often posed as multiple-choice questions, allowing models to exploit systematic biases. Commonsense is also inherently probabilistic with multiple correct answers. The purpose of “boiling wa…

2024

Learning Representations for Hierarchies with Minimal Support

NeurIPS 2024poster

When training node embedding models to represent large directed graphs (digraphs), it is impossible to observe all entries of the adjacency matrix during training. As a consequence most methods employ sampling. For very large digraphs, however, this means many (most) entries may be unobserved during…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2022

An Evaluative Measure of Clustering Methods Incorporating Hyperparameter Sensitivity

AAAI 2022technical

Clustering algorithms are often evaluated using metrics which compare with ground-truth cluster assignments, such as Rand index and NMI. Algorithm performance may vary widely for different hyperparameters, however, and thus model selection based on optimal performance for these metrics is discordant…

2022

Modeling Label Space Interactions in Multi-label Classification using Box Embeddings

ICLR 2022poster

Multi-label classification is a challenging structured prediction task in which a set of output class labels are predicted for each input. Real-world datasets often have natural or latent taxonomic relationships between labels, making it desirable for models to employ label representations capable o…

2022

Modeling Transitivity and Cyclicity in Directed Graphs via Binary Code Box Embeddings

NeurIPS 2022accept

Modeling directed graphs with differentiable representations is a fundamental requirement for performing machine learning on graph-structured data. Geometric embedding models (e.g. hyperbolic, cone, and box embeddings) excel at this task, exhibiting useful inductive biases for directed graphs. Howev…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

Word2Box: Capturing Set-Theoretic Semantics of Words using Box Embeddings

ACL 2022long

Learning representations of words in a continuous space is perhaps the most fundamental task in NLP, however words interact in ways much richer than vector dot product similarity can provide. Many relationships between words can be expressed set-theoretically, for example, adjective-noun compounds (…

2021

Box Embeddings: An open-source library for representation learning using geometric structures

EMNLP 2021system demonstrations

A fundamental component to the success of modern representation learning is the ease of performing various vector operations. Recently, objects with more geometric structure (eg. distributions, complex or hyperbolic vectors, or regions such as cones, disks, or boxes) have been explored for their alt…

2021

Capacity and Bias of Learned Geometric Embeddings for Directed Graphs

NeurIPS 2021poster

A wide variety of machine learning tasks such as knowledge base completion, ontology alignment, and multi-label classification can benefit from incorporating into learning differentiable representations of graphs or taxonomies. While vectors in Euclidean space can theoretically represent any graph,…

2021

Modeling Fine-Grained Entity Types with Box Embeddings

ACL 2021long

Neural entity typing models typically represent fine-grained entity types as vectors in a high-dimensional space, but such spaces are not well-suited to modeling these types’ complex interdependencies. We study the ability of box embeddings, which embed concepts as d-dimensional hyperrectangles, to…

2021

Probabilistic Box Embeddings for Uncertain Knowledge Graph Reasoning

NAACL 2021long

Knowledge bases often consist of facts which are harvested from a variety of sources, many of which are noisy and some of which conflict, resulting in a level of uncertainty for each triple. Knowledge bases are also often incomplete, prompting the use of embedding methods to generalize from known fa…

2020

Improving Local Identifiability in Probabilistic Box Embeddings

NeurIPS 2020poster

Geometric embeddings have recently received attention for their natural ability to represent transitive asymmetric relations via containment. Box embeddings, where objects are represented by n-dimensional hyperrectangles, are a particularly promising example of such an embedding as they are closed…

Cited by 71SourcePDFScholar
2019

Smoothing the Geometry of Probabilistic Box Embeddings

ICLR 2019oral

There is growing interest in geometrically-inspired embeddings for learning hierarchies, partial orders, and lattice structures, with natural applications to transitive relational data such as entailment graphs. Recent work has extended these ideas beyond deterministic hierarchies to probabilistical…

Cited by 106SourcePDFScholar