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Valentin Thomas

8 accepted papers

2025

CausalPFN: Amortized Causal Effect Estimation via In-Context Learning

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Causal effect estimation from observational data is fundamental across various applications. However, selecting an appropriate estimator from dozens of specialized methods demands substantial manual effort and domain expertise. We present CausalPFN, a single transformer that *amortizes* this workflo…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

TabDPT: Scaling Tabular Foundation Models on Real Data

NeurIPS 2025poster

Tabular data is one of the most ubiquitous sources of information worldwide, spanning a wide variety of domains. This inherent heterogeneity has slowed the development of Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) capable of fast generalization to unseen datasets. In-Context Learning (ICL) has recently emerge…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

Retrieval & Fine-Tuning for In-Context Tabular Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Tabular data is a pervasive modality spanning a wide range of domains, and this inherent diversity poses a considerable challenge for deep learning. Recent advancements using transformer-based in-context learning have shown promise on smaller and less complex tabular datasets, but have struggled to…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2022

On the role of overparameterization in off-policy Temporal Difference learning with linear function approximation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Much of the recent successes of deep learning can be attributed to scaling up the size of the networks to the point where they often are vastly overparameterized. Thus, understanding the role of overparameterization is of increasing importance. While predictive theories have been developed for super…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2022

The Role of Baselines in Policy Gradient Optimization

NeurIPS 2022accept

We study the effect of baselines in on-policy stochastic policy gradient optimization, and close the gap between the theory and practice of policy optimization methods. Our first contribution is to show that the \emph{state value} baseline allows on-policy stochastic \emph{natural} policy gradient (…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2021

Beyond Variance Reduction: Understanding the True Impact of Baselines on Policy Optimization

ICML 2021spotlight

Bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) problems can often be framed as optimization problems where the goal is to maximize average performance while having access only to stochastic estimates of the true gradient. Traditionally, stochastic optimization theory predicts that learning dynamics are gove…

Cited by 35SourcePDFScholar
2020

On the interplay between noise and curvature and its effect on optimization and generalization

AISTATS 2020poster

The speed at which one can minimize an expected loss using stochastic methods depends on two properties: the curvature of the loss and the variance of the gradients. While most previous works focus on one or the other of these properties, we explore how their interaction affects optimization speed.…

Cited by 72SourcePDFScholar
2019

Probabilistic Planning with Sequential Monte Carlo methods

ICLR 2019poster

In this work, we propose a novel formulation of planning which views it as a probabilistic inference problem over future optimal trajectories. This enables us to use sampling methods, and thus, tackle planning in continuous domains using a fixed computational budget. We design a new algorithm, Se…

Cited by 58SourcePDFScholar