A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that using tighter evidence lower bounds (ELBOs) can be detrimental to the process of learning an inference network by reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of the gradient estimator. Our results call into question common implicit assumptions that tighter ELBOs are better vari…
The variational autoencoder (VAE; Kingma, Welling (2014)) is a recently proposed generative model pairing a top-down generative network with a bottom-up recognition network which approximates posterior inference. It typically makes strong assumptions about posterior inference, for instance that the posterior distributi…
Importance-weighting is a popular and well-researched technique for dealing with sample selection bias and covariate shift. It has desirable characteristics such as unbiasedness, consistency and low computational complexity. However, weighting can have a detrimental effect on an estimator as well. In this work, we empi…
Sharp analysis of out-of-distribution error in overparameterized models with importance weights.
problem Understanding and quantifying the degradation of performance in overparameterized models when faced with underrepresented data.
method Sharp analysis of an overparameterized Gaussian mixture model with spurious features and cost-sensitive interpolating solutions incorporating importance weights.
result Characterization of a novel tradeoff between worst-case robustness and average accuracy as a function of importance weight magnitude.
Importance-weighted risk minimization is a key ingredient in many machine learning algorithms for causal inference, domain adaptation, class imbalance, and off-policy reinforcement learning. While the effect of importance weighting is well-characterized for low-capacity misspecified models, little is known about how it…
The standard interpretation of importance-weighted autoencoders is that they maximize a tighter lower bound on the marginal likelihood than the standard evidence lower bound. We give an alternate interpretation of this procedure: that it optimizes the standard variational lower bound, but using a more complex distribut…
Cross-validation under sample selection bias can, in principle, be done by importance-weighting the empirical risk. However, the importance-weighted risk estimator produces sub-optimal hyperparameter estimates in problem settings where large weights arise with high probability. We study its sampling variance as a funct…
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a learning framework that rely on training a discriminator to estimate a measure of difference between a target and generated distributions. GANs, as normally formulated, rely on the generated samples being completely differentiable w.r.t. the generative parameters, and thus d…
Multi-sample, importance-weighted variational autoencoders (IWAE) give tighter bounds and more accurate uncertainty estimates than variational autoencoders (VAE) trained with a standard single-sample objective. However, IWAEs scale poorly: as the latent dimensionality grows, they require exponentially many samples to r…
The paper examines when importance weighting is needed for nonparametric and misspecified models.
problem When is importance weighting correction needed for covariate shift adaptation?
method Analysis of IW-corrected kernel ridge regression in various settings.
result The importance weighting correction is needed for nonparametric and misspecified models to obtain the best approximation of the true unknown function.
Proposes a robust method for predicting missing outcomes in covariate shift adaptation.
problem Predicting missing outcomes in test data with covariate shift.
method Doubly robust estimator for covariate shift adaptation via importance weighting, incorporating an additional estimator for the regression function.
result Shows robustness against density-ratio estimation errors, maintaining consistency if either estimator is consistent.
BoostTransformer uses boosting to improve transformer efficiency and accuracy.
problem Heavy computational resources and hyperparameter tuning in transformer architectures.
method Augments transformers with boosting principles through subgrid token selection and importance-weighted sampling, incorporating a least square boosting objective directly into the pipeline.
result BoostTransformer demonstrates faster convergence and higher accuracy compared to standard transformers.
We consider the transfer of experience samples (i.e., tuples < s, a, s', r >) in reinforcement learning (RL), collected from a set of source tasks to improve the learning process in a given target task. Most of the related approaches focus on selecting the most relevant source samples for solving the target task, but t…
Recent work used importance sampling ideas for better variational bounds on likelihoods. We clarify the applicability of these ideas to pure probabilistic inference, by showing the resulting Importance Weighted Variational Inference (IWVI) technique is an instance of augmented variational inference, thus identifying th…
A new method for deep learning under distribution shift by iteratively refining importance weighting.
problem Handling distribution shift in deep learning models when training and test data distributions differ.
method Dynamic Importance Weighting (dynamic IW) that iterates between weight estimation and weighted classification, using a pre-trained feature extractor and stochastic optimization.
result Dynamic IW outperforms state-of-the-art methods in experiments with various types of distribution shift on multiple datasets.
Importance sampling is widely used in machine learning and statistics, but its power is limited by the restriction of using simple proposals for which the importance weights can be tractably calculated. We address this problem by studying black-box importance sampling methods that calculate importance weights for sampl…