22 accepted papers
Frozen self-supervised representations often transfer well with only a few labels across many semantic tasks. We argue that a single geometric quantity, *directional* CDNV (decision-axis variance), sits at the core of two favorable behaviors: strong few-shot transfer within a task, and low interfere…
We study program-learning methods that are efficient in both samples and computation. Classical learning theory suggests that when the target admits a short program description (for example, a short piece of ``Python code''), it can be learned from relatively few examples by performing ERM over the …
Self-supervised contrastive learning (CL) has achieved remarkable empirical success, often producing representations that rival supervised pre-training on downstream tasks. Recent theory explains this by showing that the CL loss closely approximates a supervised surrogate, Negatives-Only Supervised…
The recent success and openness of DeepSeek-R1 have brought widespread attention to Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) as a reinforcement learning method for large reasoning models (LRMs). In this work, we analyze the GRPO objective under a binary reward setting and reveal an inherent limitat…
This paper introduces *distributed speculative inference (DSI)*, a novel inference algorithm that is provably faster than speculative inference (SI) [leviathan2023, chen2023, miao2024, sun2025, timor2025] and standard autoregressive inference (non-SI). Like other SI algorithms, DSI operates on froze…
Understanding neural representations will help open the black box of neural networks and advance our scientific understanding of modern AI systems. However, how complex, structured, and transferable representations emerge in modern neural networks has remained a mystery. Building on previous results…
Despite its empirical success, the theoretical foundations of self-supervised contrastive learning (CL) are not yet fully established. In this work, we address this gap by showing that standard CL objectives implicitly approximate a supervised variant we call the negatives-only supervised contrastiv…
Originally proposed for handling time series data, Auto-regressive Decision Trees (ARDTs) have not yet been explored for language modeling. This paper delves into both the theoretical and practical applications of ARDTs in this new context. We theoretically demonstrate that ARDTs can compute complex…
In this paper, we conduct an empirical study of the feature learning process in deep classifiers. Recent research has identified a training phenomenon called Neural Collapse (NC), in which the top-layer feature embeddings of samples from the same class tend to concentrate around their means, and the…
In this paper, we derive norm-based generalization bounds for sparse ReLU neural networks, including convolutional neural networks. These bounds differ from previous ones because they consider the sparse structure of the neural network architecture and the norms of the convolutional filters, rather…
Understanding the learned representation and underlying mechanisms of Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) often poses a challenge. In this paper, we ‘reverse engineer’ SSL, conducting an in-depth empirical analysis of its learned internal representations, encompassing diverse models, architectures, and h…
"3D point-clouds and 2D images are different visual representations of the physical world. While human vision can understand both representations, computer vision models designed for 2D image and 3D point-cloud understanding are quite different. Our paper explores the potential of transferring 2D mo…
We study the ability of foundation models to learn representations for classification that are transferable to new, unseen classes. Recent results in the literature show that representations learned by a single classifier over many classes are competitive on few-shot learning problems with represent…
Internal learning for single-image generation is a framework, where a generator is trained to produce novel images based on a single image. Since these models are trained on a single image, they are limited in their scale and application. To overcome these issues, we propose a meta-learning approach…
We analyze the finite corrections to the neural tangent kernel (NTK) of residual and densely connected networks, as a function of both depth and width. Surprisingly, our analysis reveals that given a fixed depth, residual networks provide the best tradeoff between the parameter complexity and the co…
{\em Hypernetworks} are architectures that produce the weights of a task-specific {\em primary network}. A notable application of hypernetworks in the recent literature involves learning to output functional representations. In these scenarios, the hypernetwork learns a representation corresponding…
In the context of learning to map an input $I$ to a function $h_I:\mathcal{X}\to \mathbb{R}$, two alternative methods are compared: (i) an embedding-based method, which learns a fixed function in which $I$ is encoded as a conditioning signal $e(I)$ and the learned function takes the form $h_I(x) = q…
We present a method for recovering the shared content between two visual domains as well as the content that is unique to each domain. This allows us to map from one domain to the other, in a way in which the content that is specific for the first domain is removed and the content that is specific f…
We study the problem of learning to map, in an unsupervised way, between domains $A$ and $B$, such that the samples $\vb \in B$ contain all the information that exists in samples $\va\in A$ and some additional information. For example, ignoring occlusions, $B$ can be people with glasses, $A$ people…
This paper describes a new form of unsupervised learning, whose input is a set of unlabeled points that are assumed to be local maxima of an unknown value function $v$ in an unknown subset of the vector space. Two functions are learned: (i) a set indicator $c$, which is a binary classifier, and (ii)…
While in supervised learning, the validation error is an unbiased estimator of the generalization (test) error and complexity-based generalization bounds are abundant, no such bounds exist for learning a mapping in an unsupervised way. As a result, when training GANs and specifically when using GANs…
We discuss the feasibility of the following learning problem: given unmatched samples from two domains and nothing else, learn a mapping between the two, which preserves semantics. Due to the lack of paired samples and without any definition of the semantic information, the problem might seem ill-po…