29 accepted papers
We present GRAPE (Group RepresentAtional Position Encoding), a unified framework for positional encoding based on group actions. GRAPE brings together two families of mechanisms: (i) multiplicative rotations (Multiplicative GRAPE) in $\operatorname{SO}(d)$ and (ii) additive logit biases (Additive GR…
Policy gradient algorithms have been successfully applied to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). KL regularization is ubiquitous, yet the design surface, choice of KL direction (forward vs. reverse), normalization (normalized vs. unnormalized), and estimator ($k_1/k_2…
We present Autonomous Data Selection (AutoDS), a method that leverages base language models as zero-shot “generative classifiers” to automatically curate high-quality mathematical texts. Unlike prior approaches that require human annotations or training a dedicated data filter, AutoDS relies solely…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in formal theorem proving, but their token-level processing often fails to capture the inherent hierarchical nature of mathematical proofs. We introduce Hierarchical Attention, a regularization method that aligns LLMs’ attention mechanisms with mathema…
Scaling language models to handle longer input sequences typically necessitates large key-value (KV) caches, resulting in substantial memory overhead during inference. In this paper, we propose Tensor Product Attention (TPA), a novel attention mechanism that uses tensor decompositions to represent q…
Contrastive learning is a powerful self-supervised learning method, but we have a limited theoretical understanding of how it works and why it works. In this paper, we prove that contrastive learning with the standard InfoNCE loss is equivalent to spectral clustering on the similarity graph. Using t…
In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of two dual-branch (Siamese architecture) self-supervised learning approaches, namely Barlow Twins and spectral contrastive learning, through the lens of matrix mutual information. We prove that the loss functions of these methods implicitly optimiz…
The maximum entropy encoding framework provides a unified perspective for many non-contrastive learning methods like SimSiam, Barlow Twins, and MEC. Inspired by this framework, we introduce Matrix-SSL, a novel approach that leverages matrix information theory to interpret the maximum entropy encodin…
Generalization is one of the most fundamental challenges in deep learning, aiming to predict model performances on unseen data. Empirically, such predictions usually rely on a validation set, while recent works showed that an unlabeled validation set also works. Without validation sets, it is extrem…
We abstract the features (i.e. learned representations) of multi-modal data into 1) uni-modal features, which can be learned from uni-modal training, and 2) paired features, which can only be learned from cross-modal interactions. Multi-modal models are expected to benefit from cross-modal interacti…
With infinitely many high-quality data points, infinite computational power, an infinitely large foundation model with a perfect training algorithm and guaranteed zero generalization error on the pretext task, can the model be used for everything? This question cannot be answered by the existing the…
Conformal prediction is a distribution-free technique for establishing valid prediction intervals. Although conventionally people conduct conformal prediction in the output space, this is not the only possibility. In this paper, we propose feature conformal prediction, which extends the scope of con…
One of the major open problems in machine learning is to characterize generalization in the overparameterized regime, where most traditional generalization bounds become inconsistent even for overparameterized linear regression. In many scenarios, this failure can be attributed to obscuring the cruc…
In the current landscape of explanation methodologies, most predominant approaches, such as SHAP and LIME, employ removal-based techniques to evaluate the impact of individual features by simulating various scenarios with specific features omitted. Nonetheless, these methods primarily emphasize effi…
Generalization is one of the fundamental issues in machine learning. However, traditional techniques like uniform convergence may be unable to explain generalization under overparameterization \citep{nagarajan2019uniform}. As alternative approaches, techniques based on stability analyze the training…
It is challenging to deal with censored data, where we only have access to the incomplete information of survival time instead of its exact value. Fortunately, under linear predictor assumption, people can obtain guaranteed coverage for the confidence interval of survival time using methods like Cox…
Despite the non-convex nature of their loss functions, deep neural networks are known to generalize well when optimized with stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Recent work conjectures that SGD with proper configuration is able to find wide and flat local minima, which are correlated with good generaliz…
In this paper, we propose an effective active learning query strategy for an automatic speech recognition system with the aim of reducing the training cost. Generally, training a deep neural network with supervised learning requires a massive amount of labeled data to obtain excellent performance. H…
We introduce a “learning-based” algorithm for the low-rank decomposition problem: given an $n \times d$ matrix $A$, and a parameter $k$, compute a rank-$k$ matrix $A'$ that minimizes the approximation loss $\|A-A'\|_F$. The algorithm uses a training set of input matrices in order to optimize its p…
Strong theoretical guarantees of robustness can be given for ensembles of classifiers generated by input randomization. Specifically, an $\ell_2$ bounded adversary cannot alter the ensemble prediction generated by an additive isotropic Gaussian noise, where the radius for the adversary depends on bo…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order to understand this phenomenon, we take an alternative view t…
Facial expression recognition is a topical task. However, very little research investigates subtle expression recognition, which is important for mental activity analysis, deception detection, etc. We address subtle expression recognition through convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by developing mu…
Neural models operating over structured spaces such as knowledge graphs require a continuous embedding of the discrete elements of this space (such as entities) as well as the relationships between them. Relational embeddings with high expressivity, however, have high model complexity, making them c…
We give a simple, fast algorithm for hyperparameter optimization inspired by techniques from the analysis of Boolean functions. We focus on the high-dimensional regime where the canonical example is training a neural network with a large number of hyperparameters. The algorithm --- an iterative app…
Deep learning has achieved great success in face recognition, however deep-learned features still have limited invariance to strong intra-personal variations such as large pose. It is observed that some facial attributes (e.g. eyebrow thickness, gender) are invariant to such variations. We present t…
In recent years, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) based techniques has become the standard tools for training neural networks. However, formal theoretical understanding of why SGD can train neural networks in practice is largely missing. In this paper, we make progress on understanding this myster…
Accelerated coordinate descent is widely used in optimization due to its cheap per-iteration cost and scalability to large-scale problems. Up to a primal-dual transformation, it is also the same as accelerated stochastic gradient descent that is one of the central methods used in machine learning. I…
The amount of data available in the world is growing faster than our ability to deal with it. However, if we take advantage of the internal structure, data may become much smaller for machine learning purposes. In this paper we focus on one of the fundamental machine learning tasks, empirical risk m…
Many classical algorithms are found until several years later to outlive the confines in which they were conceived, and continue to be relevant in unforeseen settings. In this paper, we show that SVRG is one such method: being originally designed for strongly convex objectives, it is also very robus…