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 Statistical Learning


Differentially Private Relational Learning with Entity-level Privacy Guarantees

Neural Information Processing Systems

Learning with relational and network-structured data is increasingly vital in sensitive domains where protecting the privacy of individual entities is paramount. Differential Privacy (DP) offers a principled approach for quantifying privacy risks, with DP-SGD emerging as a standard mechanism for private model training. However, directly applying DP-SGD to relational learning is challenging due to two key factors: (i) entities often participate in multiple relations, resulting in high and difficult-to-control sensitivity; and (ii) relational learning typically involves multistage, potentially coupled (interdependent) sampling procedures that make standard privacy amplification analyses inapplicable. This work presents a principled framework for relational learning with formal entity-level DP guarantees. We provide a rigorous sensitivity analysis and introduce an adaptive gradient clipping scheme that modulates clipping thresholds based on entity occurrence frequency. We also extend the privacy amplification results to a tractable subclass of coupled sampling, where the dependence arises only through sample sizes. These contributions lead to a tailored DP-SGD variant for relational data with provable privacy guarantees. Experiments on fine-tuning text encoders over text-attributed network-structured relational data demonstrate the strong utility-privacy trade-offs of our approach.


Knowledge Distillation of Uncertainty using Deep Latent Factor Model

Neural Information Processing Systems

Deep ensembles deliver state-of-the-art, reliable uncertainty quantification, but their heavy computational and memory requirements hinder their practical deployments to real applications such as on-device AI. Knowledge distillation compresses an ensemble into small student models, but existing techniques struggle to preserve uncertainty partly because reducing the size of DNNs typically results in variation reduction. To resolve this limitation, we introduce a new method of distribution distillation (i.e.


Bilevel Network Learning via Hierarchically Structured Sparsity

Neural Information Processing Systems

Accurate network estimation serves as the cornerstone for understanding complex systems across scientific domains, from decoding gene regulatory networks in systems biology to identifying social relationship patterns in computational sociology. Modern applications demand methods that simultaneously address two critical challenges: capturing nonlinear dependencies between variables and reconstructing inherent hierarchical structures where higher-level entities coordinate lower-level components (e.g., functional pathways organizing gene clusters). Traditional Gaussian graphical models fundamentally fail in these aspects due to their restrictive linear assumptions and flat network representations. We propose NNBLNet, a neural network-based learning framework for bi-level network inference. The core innovation lies in hierarchical selection layers that enforce structural consistency between high-level coordinator groups and their constituent low-level connections via adaptive sparsity constraints. This architecture is integrated with a compositional neural network architecture that learn cross-level association patterns through constrained nonlinear transformations, explicitly preserving hierarchical dependencies while overcoming the representational limitations of linear methods. Crucially, we establish formal theoretical guarantees for the consistent recovery of both high-level connections and their internal low-level structures under general statistical regimes. Extensive validation demonstrates NNBLNet's effectiveness across synthetic and real-world scenarios, achieving superior F1 scores compared to competitive methods and particularly beneficial for complex systems analysis through its interpretable bi-level structure discovery.



Generalizable Reasoning through Compositional Energy Minimization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Generalization is a key challenge in machine learning, specifically in reasoning tasks, where models are expected to solve problems more complex than those encountered during training. Existing approaches typically train reasoning models in an end-to-end fashion, directly mapping input instances to solutions. While this allows models to learn useful heuristics from data, it often results in limited generalization beyond the training distribution. In this work, we propose a novel approach to reasoning generalization by learning energy landscapes over the solution spaces of smaller, more tractable subproblems. At test time, we construct a global energy landscape for a given problem by combining the energy functions of multiple subproblems. This compositional approach enables the incorporation of additional constraints during inference, allowing the construction of energy landscapes for problems of increasing difficulty. To improve the sample quality from this newly constructed energy landscape, we introduce Parallel Energy Minimization (PEM). We evaluate our approach on a wide set of reasoning problems. Our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its ability to generalize to larger and more complex problems.


Gaussian Approximation and Concentration of Constant Learning-Rate Stochastic Gradient Descent

Neural Information Processing Systems

We establish a comprehensive finite-sample and asymptotic theory for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with constant learning rates. First, we propose a novel linear approximation technique to provide a quenched central limit theorem (CLT) for SGD iterates with refined tail properties, showing that regardless of the chosen initialization, the fluctuations of the algorithm around its target point converge to a multivariate normal distribution. Our conditions are substantially milder than those required in the classical CLTs for SGD, yet offering a stronger convergence result. Furthermore, we derive the first Berry-Esseen bound - the Gaussian approximation error - for the constant learning-rate SGD, which is sharp compared to the decaying learning-rate schemes in the literature. Beyond the moment convergence, we also provide the Nagaev-type inequality for the SGD tail probabilities by adopting the autoregressive approximation techniques, which entails non-asymptotic largedeviation guarantees. These results are verified via numerical simulations, paving the way for theoretically grounded uncertainty quantification, especially with non-asymptotic validity.


MoFo: Empowering Long-term Time Series Forecasting with Periodic Pattern Modeling

Neural Information Processing Systems

The stable periodic patterns present in the time series data serve as the foundation for long-term forecasting. However, existing models suffer from limitations such as continuous and chaotic input partitioning, as well as weak inductive biases, which restrict their ability to capture such recurring structures. In this paper, we propose MoFo, which interprets periodicity as both the correlation of periodaligned time steps and the trend of period-offset time steps. We first design periodstructured patches--2D tensors generated through discrete sampling--where each row contains only period-aligned time steps, enabling direct modeling of periodic correlations. Period-offset time steps within a period are aligned in columns.


Fast Zeroth-Order Convex Optimization with Quantum Gradient Methods

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study quantum algorithms based on quantum (sub)gradient estimation using noisy function evaluation oracles, and demonstrate the first dimension-independent query complexities (up to poly-logarithmic factors) for zeroth-order convex optimization in both smooth and nonsmooth settings. Interestingly, only using noisy function evaluation oracles, we match the first-order query complexities of classical gradient descent, thereby exhibiting exponential separation between quantum and classical zeroth-order optimization. We then generalize these algorithms to work in non-Euclidean settings by using quantum (sub)gradient estimation to instantiate mirror descent and its variants, including dual averaging and mirror prox. By leveraging a connection between semidefinite programming and eigenvalue optimization, we use our quantum mirror descent method to give a new quantum algorithm for solving semidefinite programs, linear programs, and zero-sum games. We identify a parameter regime in which our zero-sum games algorithm is faster than any existing classical or quantum approach.



TreeGen: ABayesian Generative Model for Hierarchies

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this work, we introduce TreeGen, a novel generative framework modeling distributions over hierarchies. We extend Bayesian Flow Networks (BFNs) to enable transitions between probabilistic and discrete hierarchies parametrized via categorical distributions. Our proposed scheduler provides smooth and consistent entropy decay across varying numbers of categories. We empirically evaluate TreeGen on the jet-clustering task in high-energy physics, demonstrating that it consistently generates valid trees that adhere to physical constraints and closely align with ground-truth log-likelihoods. Finally, by comparing TreeGen's samples to the exact posterior distribution and performing likelihood maximization via rejection sampling, we demonstrate that TreeGen outperforms various baselines.