New algorithm reduces sample complexity for Top Two method.
problem Fixed-confidence best arm identification for Top Two methods.
method UCB-based Top Two algorithm for non-asymptotic analysis.
result First non-asymptotic upper bound on expected sample complexity.
Improved theoretical guarantees for Top Two algorithms.
problem Theoretical support for best arm identification with bounded distributions.
method General analysis of Top Two methods, identifying desirable properties and replacing sampling step.
result Theoretical support for Top Two algorithms with bounded distributions.
Top-two algorithm improved for best-k-arm selection.
problem Best-k-arm identification in multi-armed bandits.
method Information-directed selection based on dual variables.
result Top-two Thompson sampling with IDS is asymptotically optimal.
The paper proposes methods to identify and sample from mixtures of Mallows models for top-k rankings.
problem Identifying and sampling from mixtures of Mallows models for top-k rankings in a heterogeneous population.
method Efficient sampling algorithms and identifiability proofs for both components of the mixture.
result The identifiability and learnability of the Mallows components' parameters in the mixture.
Top-H decoding improves text generation by balancing creativity and coherence.
problem Balancing creativity and coherence in text generation.
method Entropy-constrained minimum divergence problem, NP-hard ECMM problem, top-H decoding.
result Top-H decoding outperforms min-p sampling by up to 25.63% on creative writing benchmarks.
We study the top-K ranking problem where the goal is to recover the set of top-K ranked items out of a large collection of items based on partially revealed preferences. We consider an adversarial crowdsourced setting where there are two population sets, and pairwise comparison samples drawn from one of the populat…
New sampling rules improve best-arm identification in Bayesian bandits.
problem Best-arm identification in Bayesian bandits with fixed confidence guarantees.
method Top-Two Thompson Sampling (TTTS) and Top-Two Transportation Cost (T3C).
result First sample complexity analysis of TTTS and T3C for Gaussian rewards.
DeepTopPush improves accuracy at the top for complex classification tasks.
problem Minimizing irrelevant samples above a threshold in binary classification.
method Proposes a new method for end-to-end training of deep networks to minimize loss at the top.
result Demonstrates excellent performance on visual recognition and real-world applications.
Efficiently selects top-m designs for various contexts using sequential sampling.
problem Optimizing selection of top-m designs across different contexts.
method Formulated as a stochastic dynamic programming problem, developed sequential sampling policy.
result Asymptotically optimal sampling ratios for efficient selection.
This paper studies the problem of identifying any k distinct arms among the top ρ fraction (e.g., top 5\%) of arms from a finite or infinite set with a probably approximately correct (PAC) tolerance ε. We consider two cases: (i) when the threshold of the top arms' expected rewards is known and (ii) when it is unk…
We consider a situation in which we see samples in Rd drawn i.i.d. from some distribution with mean zero and unknown covariance A. We wish to compute the top eigenvector of A in an incremental fashion - with an algorithm that maintains an estimate of the top eigenvector in O(d) space, and incrementally adju…
Optimal top-2 method improves best arm identification with reduced error.
problem Identifying the arm with the highest mean in a set of arms.
method A novel top-2 algorithm that pulls the empirical best arm with probability β and the challenger arm otherwise.
result The proposed algorithm matches the information theoretic lower bound on sample complexity as δ approaches 0.
Optimizes ranking of top-k players from partial comparison data.
problem Identifying the top-k players from incomplete pairwise comparisons.
method Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) and Spectral Method.
result MLE achieves optimal partial and exact recovery, while Spectral Method is sub-optimal.
Recurrent models can produce infinite sequences, causing bias; new methods prevent this.
problem Inconsistency in decoding infinite-length sequences from recurrent language models.
method Defined and proved inconsistency of common decoding algorithms; proposed remedies.
result Proposed methods prevent inconsistency in practice.
Top-k Combinatorial Bandits generalize multi-armed bandits, where at each round any subset of k out of n arms may be chosen and the sum of the rewards is gained. We address the full-bandit feedback, in which the agent observes only the sum of rewards, in contrast to the semi-bandit feedback, in which the agent obse…
Top/O's first two k-invariants are zero.
problem Understanding the structure of Top/O.
method Analyzing the first two k-invariants.
result The first two k-invariants of Top/O vanish.
WeakNAS uses a set of weaker predictors to find top architectures with fewer samples.
problem Finding the best neural architecture with heavy computation costs.
method Proposes a paradigm shift from fitting the whole architecture space to progressively fitting a search path through a set of weaker predictors.
result WeakNAS produces coarse-to-fine iteration to gradually refine the ranking of sampling space, requiring fewer samples to find top-performance architectures.
New approaches estimate recommendation metrics using sampling.
problem Understanding and resolving the use of sampling for recommendation evaluation.
method MLE and ME principles for empirical rank distribution recovery.
result Advantages of new approaches for top-k metrics estimation.
We explore the top-K rank aggregation problem. Suppose a collection of items is compared in pairs repeatedly, and we aim to recover a consistent ordering that focuses on the top-K ranked items based on partially revealed preference information. We investigate the Bradley-Terry-Luce model in which one ranks items ac…
This paper explores the preference-based top-K rank aggregation problem. Suppose that a collection of items is repeatedly compared in pairs, and one wishes to recover a consistent ordering that emphasizes the top-K ranked items, based on partially revealed preferences. We focus on the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model…
Two new algorithms improve robust PCA and Schatten packing.
problem Robustly estimating the top eigenvector of corrupted sub-Gaussian data.
method Two iterative filtering and nearly-linear time algorithms.
result First polynomial-time algorithms for non-trivial covariance estimation.
Paper recovers top-two answers and confusion probability in multi-choice crowdsourcing.
problem Recovering top-two answers and confusion probability in multi-choice crowdsourcing tasks.
method Proposes a two-stage inference algorithm based on a model quantifying task difficulty and worker reliability.
result Achieves minimax optimal convergence rate and outperforms other algorithms in synthetic and real data experiments.
This work provides improved guarantees for streaming principle component analysis (PCA). Given A1,…,An∈Rd×d sampled independently from distributions satisfying E[Ai]=Σ for Σ⪰0, this work provides an O(d)-space linear-time single-pass streaming algorithm …
Unified algorithm for efficient pure exploration using dual variables.
problem Efficiently achieving a specific goal through adaptive experimentation.
method Introducing dual variables to derive optimal allocation conditions, leading to Information-Directed Selection.
result Top-two Thompson sampling attains asymptotic optimality for Gaussian best-arm identification.
We introduce the probably approximately correct (PAC) \emph{Battling-Bandit} problem with the Plackett-Luce (PL) subset choice model--an online learning framework where at each trial the learner chooses a subset of k arms from a fixed set of n arms, and subsequently observes a stochastic feedback indicating prefere…
A framework for binary classification on top samples.
problem Binary classification problems above/below a threshold.
method General framework for ranking problems, hypothesis testing.
result Theoretical and numerical analysis of methods.
Extends linear classification framework to nonlinear SVM-based ranking problems.
problem Maximizing performance on relevant samples in ranking problems.
method Dualization, kernel addition, componentwise dual ascent method.
result General framework for nonlinear classifiers in ranking problems.
A new KD model for collaborative filtering improves top-N recommendation performance.
problem Challenges in applying KD to recommender models due to feedback sparsity and ambiguity.
method Proposes a new KD model (CD) for collaborative filtering, reformulating a loss function, using probabilistic rank-aware sampling, and developing training strategies.
result Outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.7-33.2% in hit rate (HR) and 2.7-29.1% in NDCG.
Optimizes identifying top-k items from comparisons with minimal comparisons.
problem Finding the top-k items from pairwise comparisons with a fixed error rate.
method Developed an asymptotically optimal algorithm using primal-dual procedure and adaptive comparison allocation.
result Proves the algorithm is asymptotically optimal for top-k identification.
We study the active learning problem of top-k ranking from multi-wise comparisons under the popular multinomial logit model. Our goal is to identify the top-k items with high probability by adaptively querying sets for comparisons and observing the noisy output of the most preferred item from each comparison. To ac…
Online boosting for multilabel ranking with limited feedback.
problem Multilabel ranking with top-k feedback.
method Surrogate loss function and unbiased estimator for weak learners.
result Adapted full information multilabel ranking algorithms to top-k feedback setting with theoretical and experimental support.
New methods provide stable ranking without assumptions on data distributions.
problem Stability issues in ranking problems with noisy data.
method Developed a stability framework and two ranking operators.
result Guaranteed stability without assumptions on data distributions.
Motivated by applications in recommender systems, web search, social choice and crowdsourcing, we consider the problem of identifying the set of top K items from noisy pairwise comparisons. In our setting, we are non-actively given r pairwise comparisons between each pair of n items, where each comparison has noi…
The paper studies privacy-protected BAI with fixed confidence, deriving lower bounds and proposing an adaptive algorithm.
problem Privacy-protected Best Arm Identification (BAI) in data-sensitive applications.
method Derives lower bounds on sample complexity, proposes AdaP-TT algorithm with Laplace noise, and validates with experiments.
result AdaP-TT matches the sample complexity lower bound up to constants in the high-privacy regime.
We propose Top-N-Rank, a novel family of list-wise Learning-to-Rank models for reliably recommending the N top-ranked items. The proposed models optimize a variant of the widely used discounted cumulative gain (DCG) objective function which differs from DCG in two important aspects: (i) It limits the evaluation of DCG …
A simple modification improves GAN performance by discarding bad samples.
problem Improving GAN performance with minimal computational cost.
method Top-k update procedure: zero out gradient contributions from least realistic elements.
result Significant improvement in FID score for conditional generation on CIFAR-10.
The well-known Gumbel-Max trick for sampling from a categorical distribution can be extended to sample k elements without replacement. We show how to implicitly apply this 'Gumbel-Top-k' trick on a factorized distribution over sequences, allowing to draw exact samples without replacement using a Stochastic Beam Sea…
A new method to learn EBM in latent space for better data modeling.
problem Efficiently modeling data with complex structures.
method Joint learning of latent space EBM and top-down network using maximum likelihood and MCMC sampling.
result Simple EBM in latent space captures data regularities effectively and performs well in generation and anomaly detection.
This paper is concerned with the problem of top-K ranking from pairwise comparisons. Given a collection of n items and a few pairwise comparisons across them, one wishes to identify the set of K items that receive the highest ranks. To tackle this problem, we adopt the logistic parametric model --- the Bradley-Te…
BCI system improves word selection efficiency using sequential best-arm identification.
problem Conventional non-adaptive BCI paradigms lead to a lengthy learning process.
method Casted as sequence of best-arm identification tasks in multi-armed bandits, using pre-trained LLMs and STTS algorithm.
result Substantial empirical improvement in word selection efficiency demonstrated.
Paper extends top-k Mallows model for better user preference analysis.
problem Capturing real-world user preferences focusing on a limited set of items.
method Generalized top-k Mallows model, novel sampling scheme, efficient algorithm, active learning.
result New tools for analysis and prediction in decision-making scenarios.
Efficiently allocate budgets for LLM-assisted virtual screening to reduce costs.
problem Reducing the cost of evaluating alternatives in large-scale screening tasks.
method Propose a top-m greedy evaluation mechanism and the EFG-m algorithm for efficient budget allocation. result Prove that EFG-m is both sample-optimal and consistent in large-scale virtual screening. We introduce a new sampling method for large language models that balances diversity and parallelism.
problem Balancing diversity and parallelism in decoding for large language models.
method Arithmetic sampling framework compatible with various sampling variations.
result Improves estimation of expected BLEU score reward and reduces the gap with beam search.
Unified framework for deferring queries to top-k experts, improving accuracy-cost trade-offs.
problem Limitation of existing L2D frameworks to single-expert deferral.
method Top-k Learning-to-Defer framework, including adaptive Top-k(x) variant. result Superior accuracy-cost trade-offs with multi-expert deferral.
Self-paced learning and hard example mining re-weight training instances to improve learning accuracy. This paper presents two improved alternatives based on lightweight estimates of sample uncertainty in stochastic gradient descent (SGD): the variance in predicted probability of the correct class across iterations of …
Improved BAI under DP reduces gap to constant.
problem Fixed-confidence BAI under global DP for Bernoulli distributions.
method New lower bound, stopping rule, and Top Two sampling rule.
result Reduces gap to a small multiplicative constant.
This paper compares average-K and top-K classification methods under ambiguity.
problem Choosing a single label in ambiguous cases leads to low precision.
method Formally characterizes ambiguity profiles and compares average-K and top-K classification methods.
result Average-K can achieve lower error rates than top-K in some ambiguous cases.
We have recently introduced the ``thermal optimal path'' (TOP) method to investigate the real-time lead-lag structure between two time series. The TOP method consists in searching for a robust noise-averaged optimal path of the distance matrix along which the two time series have the greatest similarity. Here, we gener…