Skip to content

Category

data science

2,518 papers

#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Pointwise or Pairwise: When Do Pairwise Losses Help Reward Learning, Provably?

Pairwise losses are increasingly used for reward learning even when pointwise rewards are observed, with mixed empirical results. When and why do pairwise losses outperform pointwise losses? We study this question in a grouped offline contextual-bandit setting allowing multiple actions per context, capturing many rewar...

Junghyun Lee, Minsoo Ha, Sanghwa Kim et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Interpretable intrinsic dimension estimation through componentwise calibration of distance and angle

DANCo (Dimensionality from Angle and Norm Concentration) jointly calibrates nearest-neighbor distance and angular statistics and consistently reaches state-of-the-art accuracy on clean intrinsic-dimension (ID) benchmarks. Practical data, however, introduce neighborhood-relative noise and sample-amplitude heterogeneity...

Chih-Hsuan Huang, Chih-Wei Chen, Szu-Chi Chung · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Iterative Exact Discrete Guidance for Energy-Based Sampling

Sampling from unnormalized distributions over large discrete state spaces becomes difficult when a multimodal target is far from a tractable reference. We introduce Iterative Exact Discrete Guidance (IEDG), a population-exact, trajectory-wise guidance framework for unnormalized discrete targets. Rather than learn the f...

Yuwen Qian, Yi-Dong Ouyang, Zheng-Yan Wan et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Scalable Diffusion SBI for Compositional Inference under Simulator Misspecification

Simulation-based inference is challenging when many heterogeneous observations must be composed, hierarchical latent structure must be preserved, and the simulator is misspecified relative to observed data. We develop sampling and fine-tuning methods for diffusion-based inference in design-conditional settings, where t...

Vincent D. Zaballa, Elliot E. Hui · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Federated Clustering with Unknown Local and Global Cluster Cardinalities

Federated clustering methods that do not require the global number of clusters $K$ still assume that each client knows its local number $K_g$. This assumption is hard to justify when clients know no more about their data than the server does, as in fault diagnosis across independently operated industrial sites. We prop...

Mitushi Goyal, S. Tarun, Riddhanya Senapathi et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

When Is Coarse Supervision Worth It? Cost-Aware Learning under Unknown Aggregation

Modern learning systems often acquire supervision at multiple resolutions, trading annotation cost against information content. We study cost-aware two-resolution learning, where expensive fine labels reveal a vector response and cheaper coarse labels reveal a scalar aggregate formed with unknown weights, while the tar...

Jianyu Xu, Smriti Jha, Aarti Singh et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Understanding Private Evolution as Learning-Augmented Clustering

Private Evolution (PE) is a differentially private algorithm for synthetic data generation. While it can be viewed as a Wasserstein learning algorithm, it performs much better in practice than worst-case Wasserstein analyses would predict. We recast PE as generative model-augmented Wasserstein learning. We show theoret...

Audra McMillan, Kunal Talwar, Felix Zhou · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Optimal Multi-Reward Reinforcement Learning

We study an unknown-transition finite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP) with a finite collection of known reward functions $\{r^1, r^2, \ldots, r^M\}$. The goal is to output an $\epsilon$-optimal policy for every reward using online episodic interaction only. Performance is measured by the policy error $V_{0}^{*, m...

Zi-Jun Chen, Zi-Han Zhang · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Adapting Linear-Time Architectures for Tabular In-Context Learning

Tabular foundation models achieve strong performance by conditioning on labelled examples in context, but softmax attention limits their use on large datasets. Existing linear-time alternatives, however, are mostly causal, and their potential for tabular in-context learning (ICL) remains underexplored. To address this,...

David Schnurr, Felix Sarnthein, Thomas Hofmann et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Cheap and Powerful Tests for Supervised Subspaces: Per-Component Inference for PLS

Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression extracts a few outcome-aligned directions in a high-dimensional X and is widely used across applied science, but inference on the resulting fit is either expensive, biased and discouraged, or absent. We reduce inference to held-out OLS refits of the supervised subspace, a primitiv...

Paweł Lenartowicz, Hubert Plisiecki · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

GNA: Granular Neighbor Assembly for Retrieval-Augmented Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting

Deep forecasters predict from a fixed-length lookback window, and lengthening it gives diminishing returns at a growing cost. Retrieval augmentation instead shows the model how similar past situations continued. Retrieving a whole past window gives every variate the continuation of the same past moment. In multivariate...

Vincent Uhse · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Stochastic Optimization Under Power-Law Spectra: Tight Bounds and Shuffling Analysis

Recent work has established that power-law spectral conditions on data enable tight convergence bounds for deterministic gradient descent, resolving the conflict between classical exponential bounds and observed power-law learning curves. In this work, we extend this result to the stochastic regime of high-dimensional...

Thomas Dybdahl Ahle, Yaroslav Bulatov, Christopher De Sa et al. · 0 citations

From tech blogs

See all →
Microsoft Research Blog Oct 6, 2026

What AI gets wrong and what failure teaches us

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.

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.