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Sushrut Karmalkar

17 accepted papers

2026

Forward-Learned Discrete Diffusion: Learning how to noise to denoise faster

ICLR 2026poster

Discrete diffusion models are a powerful class of generative models that demonstrate strong performance across many domains. However, for efficiency, discrete diffusion typically parameterizes the generative (reverse) process with factorized distributions, which makes it difficult for the model to l…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Parallel Sampling from Masked Diffusion Models via Conditional Independence Testing

ICLR 2026poster

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) offer a compelling alternative to autoregres- sive models (ARMs) for discrete text generation because they enable parallel token sampling, rather than sequential, left-to-right generation. This means po- tentially much faster inference. However, effective parallel samp…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Batch List-Decodable Linear Regression via Higher Moments

ICML 2025poster

We study the task of list-decodable linear regression using batches, recently introduced by Das et al. 2023.. In this setting, we are given $m$ batches with each batch containing $n$ points in $\mathbb R^d$. A batch is called clean if the points it contains are i.i.d. samples from an unknown linea…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

On Learning Parallel Pancakes with Mostly Uniform Weights

ICML 2025spotlight

We study the complexity of learning $k$-mixtures of Gaussians ($k$-GMMs) on $\mathbb R^d$. This task is known to have complexity $d^{\Omega(k)}$ in full generality. To circumvent this exponential lower bound on the number of components, research has focused on learning families of GMMs satisfying ad…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning a Single Neuron Robustly to Distributional Shifts and Adversarial Label Noise

NeurIPS 2024poster

We study the problem of learning a single neuron with respect to the $L_2^2$-loss in the presence of adversarial distribution shifts, where the labels can be arbitrary, and the goal is to find a "best-fit" function. More precisely, given training samples from a reference distribution $p_0$, the goa…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Multi-Model 3D Registration: Finding Multiple Moving Objects in Cluttered Point Clouds

ICRA 2024poster

We investigate a variation of the 3D registration problem, named multi-model 3D registration. In the multi-model registration problem, we are given two point clouds picturing a set of objects at different poses (and possibly including points belonging to the background) and we want to simultaneously…

Cited by 13SourceScholar
2024

Robust Sparse Estimation for Gaussians with Optimal Error under Huber Contamination

ICML 2024poster

We study Gaussian sparse estimation tasks in Huber's contamination model with a focus on mean estimation, PCA, and linear regression. For each of these tasks, we give the first sample and computationally efficient robust estimators with optimal error guarantees, within constant factors. All prior ef…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

First Order Stochastic Optimization with Oblivious Noise

NeurIPS 2023poster

We initiate the study of stochastic optimization with oblivious noise, broadly generalizing the standard heavy-tailed noise setup. In our setting, in addition to random observation noise, the stochastic gradient may be subject to independent \emph{oblivious noise}, which may not have bounded momen…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2022

List-Decodable Sparse Mean Estimation via Difference-of-Pairs Filtering

NeurIPS 2022accept

We study the problem of list-decodable sparse mean estimation. Specifically, for a parameter $\alpha \in (0, 1/2)$, we are given $m$ points in $\mathbb{R}^n$, $\lfloor \alpha m \rfloor$ of which are i.i.d. samples from a distribution $D$ with unknown $k$-sparse mean $\mu$. No assumptions are made on…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2021

Fairness for Image Generation with Uncertain Sensitive Attributes

ICML 2021spotlight

This work tackles the issue of fairness in the context of generative procedures, such as image super-resolution, which entail different definitions from the standard classification setting. Moreover, while traditional group fairness definitions are typically defined with respect to specified protect…

2021

Instance-Optimal Compressed Sensing via Posterior Sampling

ICML 2021spotlight

We characterize the measurement complexity of compressed sensing of signals drawn from a known prior distribution, even when the support of the prior is the entire space (rather than, say, sparse vectors). We show for Gaussian measurements and \emph{any} prior distribution on the signal, that the po…

2020

Superpolynomial Lower Bounds for Learning One-Layer Neural Networks using Gradient Descent

ICML 2020poster

We give the first superpolynomial lower bounds for learning one-layer neural networks with respect to the Gaussian distribution for a broad class of algorithms. In the regression setting, we prove that gradient descent run on any classifier with respect to square loss will fail to achieve small test…

Cited by 88SourcePDFScholar
2019

Outlier-Robust High-Dimensional Sparse Estimation via Iterative Filtering

NeurIPS 2019poster

We study high-dimensional sparse estimation tasks in a robust setting where a constant fraction of the dataset is adversarially corrupted. Specifically, we focus on the fundamental problems of robust sparse mean estimation and robust sparse PCA. We give the first practically viable robust estimators…

2019

Time/Accuracy Tradeoffs for Learning a ReLU with respect to Gaussian Marginals

NeurIPS 2019spotlight

We consider the problem of computing the best-fitting ReLU with respect to square-loss on a training set when the examples have been drawn according to a spherical Gaussian distribution (the labels can be arbitrary). Let $\opt < 1$ be the population loss of the best-fitting ReLU. We prove:…

Cited by 61SourcePDFScholar