Diffusion models provide an expressive framework for sampling from complex, unnormalized distributions. In this work, we extend Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (ME-RL) to diffusion-based policies by introducing Diffusion-Augmented Markov Decision Processes (DA-MDPs). DA-MDPs interpret each reverse-diffusion tran...
Sebastian Sanokowski, Kaustubh Patil, Majid Khadiv· 0 citations
Most self-supervised learning objectives defend against collapse but leave the target representation law unspecified. We formulate representation learning as Distribution Matching (DM), learning an augmentation-invariant encoder whose induced law matches an explicit geometric reference. The reference law specifies what...
Yuling Jiao, Wensen Ma, Defeng Sun et al.· 0 citations
Over the past decade, Machine Learning (ML) has been trained under dual objectives: minimizing prediction error via Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) while controlling unfairness bias. In practice, however, fairness-aware training often yields limited improvements over standard ERM, making reliable post hoc auditing es...
Density estimation is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning. In this work, we introduce BayesNDE, a neural density estimator based on Bayesian generative modeling. BayesNDE learns a Bayesian generative model and evaluates its density without requiring invertible networks or Jacobian-determinant compu...
Cheng-Lin Li, Qiao Liu· 0 citations
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Building on a probabilistic perspective in which adversarial examples arise from the overlap between a distance-based distribution $p_{\mathrm{dis}}$ and a victim-classifier-induced distribution $p_{\mathrm{vic}}$, we start from a simple intuition: adversarial examples become harder to generate when these two distribut...
Longitudinal clinical cohorts are multimodal, irregularly sampled and pervasively incomplete: in ADNI, positron emission tomography and cerebrospinal fluid assays are absent from roughly half of all visits. Linear state-space models handle irregular sampling gracefully but treat a missing modality by masking the input,...
M. R. Rahman, Mostafa A. Hammouda, Wolfgang Maass· 0 citations
In semantic segmentation, a recent line of RankSEG methods directly optimizes Dice/IoU scores at inference time, improving alignment with evaluation metrics without modifying model training. Despite its theoretical and empirical success, RankSEG relies on the restrictive Conditional Independence Assumption (CIA), which...
On-policy distillation (OPD) learns from teacher feedback on student-generated responses and has shown promise in reducing forgetting relative to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, its benefits and fragility remain incompletely understood. We study sequential distillation from multiple teachers, where the student m...
Qi-Wei Di, Xu-Heng Li, Kaixuan Ji et al.· 0 citations
We study multi-armed bandits (MAB) with multiple optimal arms, motivated by the fact that many practical decision making problems admit multiple correct answers. For $K$-armed bandits with $A$ optimal arms, we first provide a sharper analysis of previous sub-sampling algorithms (De Heide et al., 2021; Zhu and Nowak, 20...
Kaixuan Ji, Qi-Wei Di, Qing-Yue Zhao et al.· 0 citations
Defining a weighted mean over probability measures under probability metrics is a central tool in probabilistic machine learning. Under the Wasserstein metric, these are called \emph{Wasserstein barycenters}. While most approaches compute barycenters for a fixed weight vector, approximating the whole family of barycent...
We introduce ShamAN-Q, a sub-1-bit post-training quantization method that extends NanoQuant by replacing each its diagonal reconstruction geometry with a tractable dense curvature metric, using a general paradigm popularized by the Shampoo optimizer. For each linear weight, ShamAN-Q fits a Kronecker product to the empi...
Jonathan Mei, Sang Hyub Kim, Oliver Knitter et al.· 0 citations
Discrete diffusion models and flow matching have emerged as powerful frameworks for generative modeling over discrete state spaces, yet efficient few-step generation remains a fundamental challenge. In this work, we introduce the Discrete Average Generator, a principled extension of MeanFlow to Continuous-Time Markov C...
Yi-Dong Ouyang, Zheng-Yan Wan, Themistoklis Haris et al.· 0 citations
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.
