VAEs and GANs use simple distributions and neural networks to implicitly approximate complex data distributions.
arXiv research
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Transformers show better in-context learning resilience under distribution shifts than simple MLPs.
A simple method flags images as out-of-distribution based on their distance to nearest neighbors.
Simple mean and std-based classifier outperforms chance on 69 out of 128 time-series problems.
We present a simple noise-robust margin-based active learning algorithm to find homogeneous (passing the origin) linear separators and analyze its error convergence when labels are corrupted by noise. We show that when the imposed noise satisfies the Tsybakov low noise condition (Mammen, Tsybakov, and others 1999; Tsyb…
Personal income distributions in Japan are analyzed empirically and a simple stochastic model of the income process is proposed. Based on empirical facts, we propose a minimal two-factor model. Our model of personal income consists of an asset accumulation process and a wage process. We show that these simple processes…
We present a simple approach to forecasting conditional probability distributions of asset returns. We work with a parsimonious specification of ordered binary choice regression that imposes a connection on sign predictability across different quantiles. The model forecasts the future conditional probability distributi…
This work adopts the very successful distributional perspective on reinforcement learning and adapts it to the continuous control setting. We combine this within a distributed framework for off-policy learning in order to develop what we call the Distributed Distributional Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm, …
Simplifies denoising score matching for manifold learning.
We present a simple generative framework for learning to predict previously unseen classes, based on estimating class-attribute-gated class-conditional distributions. We model each class-conditional distribution as an exponential family distribution and the parameters of the distribution of each seen/unseen class are d…
We introduce a simple agent-based model which allows us to analyze three stylized facts: a fat-tailed size distribution of companies, a `tent-shaped' growth rate distribution, the scaling relation of the growth rate variance with firm size, and the causality between them. This is achieved under the simple hypothesis th…
As energy markets begin clearing at sub-hourly rates, their interaction with load control systems becomes a potentially important consideration. A simple model for the control of thermal systems using market-based power distribution strategies is proposed, with particular attention to the behavior and dynamics of elect…
Simple methods combine statistical tests for out-of-distribution detection.
Although neural networks are routinely and successfully trained in practice using simple gradient-based methods, most existing theoretical results are negative, showing that learning such networks is difficult, in a worst-case sense over all data distributions. In this paper, we take a more nuanced view, and consider w…
We stabilize the Kumaraswamy distribution for efficient sampling and differentiation.
We develop a simple test for deviations from power law tails, which is based on the asymptotic properties of the empirical distribution function. We use this test to answer the question whether great natural disasters, financial crashes or electricity price spikes should be classified as dragon kings or 'only' as black…
Paper introduces a simple method to assign uncertainty in contrastive learning models.
New approach to machine learning optimization using distribution space.
We introduce a conceptually simple and effective method to quantify the similarity between relations in knowledge bases. Specifically, our approach is based on the divergence between the conditional probability distributions over entity pairs. In this paper, these distributions are parameterized by a very simple neural…
Natural-gradient methods enable fast and simple algorithms for variational inference, but due to computational difficulties, their use is mostly limited to \emph{minimal} exponential-family (EF) approximations. In this paper, we extend their application to estimate \emph{structured} approximations such as mixtures of E…
Gradient-based approximate inference methods, such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), provide simple and general-purpose inference engines for differentiable continuous distributions. However, existing forms of SVGD cannot be directly applied to discrete distributions. In this work, we fill this gap by propo…
This paper introduces a new market making approach using scaled beta distributions.
TTF improves performance of normalizing flows for heavy-tailed distributions.
An efficient conditioning technique, the so-called Brownian Bridge simulation, has previously been applied to eliminate pricing bias that arises in applications of the standard discrete-time Monte Carlo method to evaluate options written on the continuous-time extrema of an underlying asset. It is based on the simple a…
Unified framework for OOD detection using class ratio estimation.
Variational Auto-Encoders enforce their learned intermediate latent-space data distribution to be a simple distribution, such as an isotropic Gaussian. However, this causes the posterior collapse problem and loses manifold structure which can be important for datasets such as facial images. A GAN can transform a simple…
Outliers are ubiquitous in modern data sets. Distance-based techniques are a popular non-parametric approach to outlier detection as they require no prior assumptions on the data generating distribution and are simple to implement. Scaling these techniques to massive data sets without sacrificing accuracy is a challeng…
How to forecast next year's portfolio-wide credit default rate based on last year's default observations and the current score distribution? A classical approach to this problem consists of fitting a mixture of the conditional score distributions observed last year to the current score distribution. This is a special (…
In this paper, we propose a simple, versatile model for learning the structure and parameters of multivariate distributions from a data set. Learning a Markov network from a given data set is not a simple problem, because Markov networks rigorously represent Markov properties, and this rigor imposes complex constraints…
A simple graphical model for correlated defaults is proposed, with explicit formulas for the loss distribution. Algebraic geometry techniques are employed to show that this model is well posed for default dependence: it represents any given marginal distribution for single firms and pairwise correlation matrix. These t…
Conventional out-of-distribution (OOD) detection schemes based on variational autoencoder or Random Network Distillation (RND) have been observed to assign lower uncertainty to the OOD than the target distribution. In this work, we discover that such conventional novelty detection schemes are also vulnerable to the blu…
Distributed statistical inference has recently attracted enormous attention. Many existing work focuses on the averaging estimator. We propose a one-step approach to enhance a simple-averaging based distributed estimator. We derive the corresponding asymptotic properties of the newly proposed estimator. We find that th…
Distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) has seen empirical success in complex Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in the setting of nonlinear function approximation. However, there are many different ways in which one can leverage the distributional approach to reinforcement learning. In this paper, we p…
EDG generates Boltzmann samples from latent variables efficiently.
Gradient-based methods can be biased by distributional asymmetries in bivariate categorical data.
Flow-based deep generative models learn data distributions by transforming a simple base distribution into a complex distribution via a set of invertible transformations. Due to the invertibility, such models can score unseen data samples by computing their exact likelihood under the learned distribution. This makes fl…
We consider a simple model of firm/city/etc. growth based on a multi-item criterion: whenever entity B fares better that entity A on a subset of items out of , the agent originally in A moves to B. We solve the model analytically in the cases and . The resulting stationary distribution of siz…
A fast method for estimating radar amplitude density parameters.
The transition probability of a Cox-Ingersoll-Ross process can be represented by a non-central chi-square density. First we prove a new representation for the central chi-square density based on sums of powers of generalized Gaussian random variables. Second we prove Marsaglia's polar method extends to this distributio…
Estimating statistical models within sensor networks requires distributed algorithms, in which both data and computation are distributed across the nodes of the network. We propose a general approach for distributed learning based on combining local estimators defined by pseudo-likelihood components, encompassing a num…
Simple models are preferred over complex models, but over-simplistic models could lead to erroneous interpretations. The classical approach is to start with a simple model, whose shortcomings are assessed in residual-based model diagnostics. Eventually, one increases the complexity of this initial overly simple model a…
Classifies non-integrable distributions with simple infinite-dimensional Lie superalgebras of symmetries.
Compression is at the heart of effective representation learning. However, lossy compression is typically achieved through simple parametric models like Gaussian noise to preserve analytic tractability, and the limitations this imposes on learning are largely unexplored. Further, the Gaussian prior assumptions in model…
A new method for aligning multiple distributions efficiently.
Estimating Kullback-Leibler divergence from identical and independently distributed samples is an important problem in various domains. One simple and effective estimator is based on the k nearest neighbor distances between these samples. In this paper, we analyze the convergence rates of the bias and variance of this …
A method uses neural networks to approximate sampling distributions of test statistics.
A new sampler for complex discrete distributions efficiently updates all variables in parallel.
In regression tasks the distribution of the data is often too complex to be fitted by a single model. In contrast, partition-based models are developed where data is divided and fitted by local models. These models partition the input space and do not leverage the input-output dependency of multimodal-distributed data,…