Top-two algorithms are simple and effective for fixed-confidence best-arm identification, but their sharp non-asymptotic behavior is still not well understood. We study this problem for Bernoulli bandits through $\beta$-EB-TCI, the empirical-best top-two rule of Jourdan et al., whose challenger is chosen using a Bernou...
Neural activity often exhibits multiple timescales that can vary with behavioral states and task conditions. Identifying these timescales from neural recordings is important for better understanding neural computation and function. However, traditional approaches based on autocorrelation fitting are difficult to scale...
In-context learning (ICL) enables a pretrained model to infer a task from demonstrations without updating its parameters. While much of the existing theory focuses on linear target functions, in this paper we study nonlinear cases by comparing two one-layer attention architectures on the same family of single-index tas...
Hao-Tian Gu, Yi-Zhou Xu, L. Zdeborová· 0 citations
Many scientific and machine learning systems, from molecular dynamics to diffusion models and beyond, are governed by stochastic dynamics with low-dimensional structure, evolving on slow timescales. However, target trajectories, used to identify and interpret such dynamics, are often inaccessible: only biased or static...
Vladimir R. Kostic, Karim Lounici, Hélène Halconruy et al.· 0 citations
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We study logistic regression on linearly separable data under gradient descent with a large constant stepsize $\eta$. Such dynamics may exhibit a characteristic Edge of Stability phenomenon, in which the loss initially oscillates before transitioning to a stable phase of monotone decrease. Existing work provides a tigh...
We introduce the Clifford Sheaf Neural Network (CSNN), an equivariant sheaf neural network for geometric graphs that places a Clifford algebra on each stalk of a cellular sheaf and transports multivector features along edges. The canonical choice of restriction map for sheaves with algebra-valued stalks is algebra homo...
Bayesian Optimisation (BO) is a powerful framework for the optimisation of expensive black-box functions, but typically requires refitting a surrogate and maximising an acquisition function at every evaluation step. In-context approaches based on Prior-data Fitted Networks (PFNs) amortise part of this cost by pre-train...
Models specialized for the same task converge to similar behavior, yet the parameter updates that produce it share no common coordinate system, so weight-space task arithmetic stays confined to a single model and cannot cross architectures without a structural correspondence. Drawing on Plato's allegory of the cave, we...
By learning transferable rewards, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) enables counterfactual evaluation of agents under modified environments. Such transfer places strict requirements on coverage since target environments affect agents'state occupancy. We propose a multi-task IRL method that pools data across multiple...
Allen Tran, Jia Wan, Nathan Kallus et al.· 0 citations
Recent theoretical work identified fundamental properties of representation geometry that shape inference ability of deep neural networks. These include signal-noise factorization (SNF), the ability to segregate signal from noise, and signal-signal factorization (SSF), the ability to segregate task-specific and task-ir...
We introduce Grand Canonical Generators (GCG), a generative framework that extends Boltzmann generators to the grand canonical ensemble. We present two designs. The first conditions a variable-size generative model on the chemical potential, sampling particle number and configuration jointly. The second factorizes the...
Andreas Burger, Malte Franke, Luka Mucko et al.· 0 citations
As an alternative to the standard geometric analyses, we give an exact, information-theoretic analysis of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. We show that a preconditioned SGD step is the posterior-mean update of a Gaussian Bayes model, and that its one-step regret splits into an intrinsic-time cost and...
Jennifer Neville did not want to go into computer science—but that’s exactly where she landed. Neville discusses the starts and stops that led to her professional sweet spot and her work identifying “surprising failures” making it hard for AI to handle complexity. The post What AI gets wrong and what failure teaches us appeared first on Microsoft Research.