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Pablo Barcelo

11 accepted papers

2026

Language Generation in the Limit: Complexity Barriers and Implications for Learning

ICML 2026spotlight

Kleinberg and Mullainathan showed that language generation in the limit is always possible at the level of computability: given enough positive examples, a learner can eventually generate data indistinguishable from a target language. However, such existence results do not address feasibility. We st…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Message Passing on the Edge: Towards Scalable and Expressive GNNs

ICML 2026poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used in graph learning and most architectures propagate information by passing messages between vertices. In this work, we shift our attention to GNNs that perform message passing on *edges* and introduce EB-1WL, an edge-based color-refinement test, and a corr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

How Expressive are Knowledge Graph Foundation Models?

ICML 2025poster

Knowledge Graph Foundation Models (KGFMs) are at the frontier for deep learning on knowledge graphs (KGs), as they can generalize to completely novel knowledge graphs with different relational vocabularies. Despite their empirical success, our theoretical understanding of KGFMs remains very limited.…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Logical Languages Accepted by Transformer Encoders with Hard Attention

ICLR 2024poster

We contribute to the study of formal languages that can be recognized by transformer encoders. We focus on two self-attention mechanisms: (1) UHAT (Unique Hard Attention Transformers) and (2) AHAT (Average Hard Attention Transformers). UHAT encoders are known to recognize only languages inside the…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2023

A Theory of Link Prediction via Relational Weisfeiler-Leman on Knowledge Graphs

NeurIPS 2023poster

Graph neural networks are prominent models for representation learning over graph-structured data. While the capabilities and limitations of these models are well-understood for simple graphs, our understanding remains incomplete in the context of knowledge graphs. Our goal is to provide a systemati…

2023

Three Iterations of (d − 1)-WL Test Distinguish Non Isometric Clouds of d-dimensional Points

NeurIPS 2023poster

The Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) test is a fundamental iterative algorithm for checking the isomorphism of graphs. It has also been observed that it underlies the design of several graph neural network architectures, whose capabilities and performance can be understood in terms of the expressive power of…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2022

On Computing Probabilistic Explanations for Decision Trees

NeurIPS 2022accept

Formal XAI (explainable AI) is a growing area that focuses on computing explanations with mathematical guarantees for the decisions made by ML models. Inside formal XAI, one of the most studied cases is that of explaining the choices taken by decision trees, as they are traditionally deemed as one o…

Cited by 55SourcePDFScholar
2021

Foundations of Symbolic Languages for Model Interpretability

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

Several queries and scores have recently been proposed to explain individual predictions over ML models. Examples include queries based on “anchors”, which are parts of an instance that are sufficient to justify its classification, and “feature-perturbation” scores such as SHAP. Given the need for f…

2021

Graph Neural Networks with Local Graph Parameters

NeurIPS 2021poster

Various recent proposals increase the distinguishing power of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) by propagating features between k-tuples of vertices. The distinguishing power of these “higher-order” GNNs is known to be bounded by the k-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) test, yet their O(n^k) memory requi…