This paper introduces a novel prior called Diversified Block Sparse Prior to characterize the widespread block sparsity phenomenon in real-world data. By allowing diversification on intra-block variance and inter-block correlation matrices, we effectively address the sensitivity issue of existing block sparse learning methods to pre-defined block information, which enables adaptive block estimation while mitigating the risk of overfitting. Based on this, a diversified block sparse Bayesian learning method (DivSBL) is proposed, utilizing EM algorithm and dual ascent method for hyperparameter estimation. Moreover, we establish the global and local optimality theory of our model.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) provides a principled framework for aligning AI systems with human preference data. For various reasons, e.g., personal bias, context ambiguity, lack of training, etc, human annotators may give incorrect or inconsistent preference labels. To tackle this challenge, we propose a robust RLHF approach -- R 3M, which models the potentially corrupted preference label as sparse outliers. Accordingly, we formulate the robust reward learning as an \ell_1 -regularized maximum likelihood estimation problem. Computationally, we develop an efficient alternating optimization algorithm, which only incurs negligible computational overhead compared with the standard RLHF approach.

In tasks aiming for long-term returns, planning becomes essential. We study generative modeling for planning with datasets repurposed from offline reinforcement learning. Specifically, we identify temporal consistency in the absence of step-wise rewards as one key technical challenge. We introduce the Latent Plan Transformer (LPT), a novel model that leverages a latent variable to connect a Transformer- based trajectory generator and the final return. LPT can be learned with maximum likelihood estimation on trajectory-return pairs.

Leveraging human preferences for steering the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated notable success in recent years. Nonetheless, data selection and labeling are still a bottleneck for these systems, particularly at large scale. Hence, selecting the most informative points for acquiring human feedback may considerably reduce the cost of preference labeling and unleash the further development of LLMs. Bayesian Active Learning provides a principled framework for addressing this challenge and has demonstrated remarkable success in diverse settings. However, previous attempts to employ it for Preference Modeling did not meet such expectations.

Federated learning (FL), through its privacy-preserving collaborative learning approach, has significantly empowered decentralized devices. However, constraints in either data and/or computational resources among participating clients introduce several challenges in learning, including the inability to train large model architectures, heightened risks of overfitting, and more. In this work, we present a novel FL framework grounded in Bayesian learning to address these challenges. Our approach involves training personalized Bayesian models at each client tailored to the unique complexities of the clients' datasets and efficiently collaborating across these clients. By leveraging Bayesian neural networks and their uncertainty quantification capabilities, our local training procedure robustly learns from small datasets.

Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have gained popularity with multiple works showing promising results across various applications. However, to the best of our knowledge, existing works do not explicitly model the distribution of training camera poses, or consequently the triangulation quality, a key factor affecting reconstruction quality dating back to classical vision literature. We close this gap with ProvNeRF, an approach that models the provenance for each point -- i.e., the locations where it is likely visible -- of NeRFs as a stochastic field. We achieve this by extending implicit maximum likelihood estimation (IMLE) to functional space with an optimizable objective. We show that modeling per-point provenance during the NeRF optimization enriches the model with information on triangulation leading to improvements in novel view synthesis and uncertainty estimation under the challenging sparse, unconstrained view setting against competitive baselines.

When a model's predicted number of events within any time interval is similar to the observed number, it is called well-calibrated. A survival model's calibration can be measured using, for instance, distributional calibration (D-CALIBRATION) [Haider et al., 2020] which computes the squared difference between the observed and predicted number of events within different time intervals. Classically, calibration is addressed in post-training analysis. We develop explicit calibration (X-CAL), which turns D-CALIBRATION into a differentiable objective that can be used in survival modeling alongside maximum likelihood estimation and other objectives. X-CAL allows us to directly optimize calibration and strike a desired trade-off between predictive power and calibration.

The majority of language model training builds on imitation learning. It covers pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and affects the starting conditions for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The simplicity and scalability of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for next token prediction led to its role as predominant paradigm. However, the broader field of imitation learning can more effectively utilize the sequential structure underlying autoregressive generation. We focus on investigating the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) perspective to imitation, extracting rewards and directly optimizing sequences instead of individual token likelihoods and evaluate its benefits for fine-tuning large language models.

When releasing outputs from confidential data, agencies need to balance the analytical usefulness of the released data with the obligation to protect data subjects' confidentiality. For releases satisfying differential privacy, this balance is reflected by the privacy budget, \varepsilon . We provide a framework for setting \varepsilon based on its relationship with Bayesian posterior probabilities of disclosure. The agency responsible for the data release decides how much posterior risk it is willing to accept at various levels of prior risk, which implies a unique \varepsilon . Agencies can evaluate different risk profiles to determine one that leads to an acceptable trade-off in risk and utility.

This work explores the challenging problem of molecule design by framing it as a conditional generative modeling task, where target biological properties or desired chemical constraints serve as conditioning variables.We propose the Latent Prompt Transformer (LPT), a novel generative model comprising three components: (1) a latent vector with a learnable prior distribution modeled by a neural transformation of Gaussian white noise; (2) a molecule generation model based on a causal Transformer, which uses the latent vector as a prompt; and (3) a property prediction model that predicts a molecule's target properties and/or constraint values using the latent prompt. LPT can be learned by maximum likelihood estimation on molecule-property pairs. During property optimization, the latent prompt is inferred from target properties and constraints through posterior sampling and then used to guide the autoregressive molecule generation.After initial training on existing molecules and their properties, we adopt an online learning algorithm to progressively shift the model distribution towards regions that support desired target properties. Experiments demonstrate that LPT not only effectively discovers useful molecules across single-objective, multi-objective, and structure-constrained optimization tasks, but also exhibits strong sample efficiency.