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A medieval Scot rocked a 20-carat gold dental bridge

Popular Science

It probably looked as cool as you think. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Gold ligature surrounding the left central incisor and the right lateral incisor on the mandible of an adult male buried in the East Kirk of the parish church of St Nicholas, Aberdeen, Scotland. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Today, extensive tooth repair or replacement often requires the installation of a dental bridge made from durable resin and metal.


A unifying view of contrastive learning, importance sampling, and bridge sampling for energy-based models

Martino, Luca

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In the last decades, energy-based models (EBMs) have become an important class of probabilistic models in which a component of the likelihood is intractable and therefore cannot be evaluated explicitly. Consequently, parameter estimation in EBMs is challenging for conventional inference methods. In this work, we provide a unified framework that connects noise contrastive estimation (NCE), reverse logistic regression (RLR), multiple importance sampling (MIS), and bridge sampling within the context of EBMs. We further show that these methods are equivalent under specific conditions. This unified perspective clarifies relationships among existing methods and enables the development of new estimators, with the potential to improve statistical and computational efficiency. Furthermore, this study helps elucidate the success of NCE in terms of its flexibility and robustness, while also identifying scenarios in which its performance can be further improved. Hence, rather than being a purely descriptive review, this work offers a unifying perspective and additional methodological contributions. The MATLAB code used in the numerical experiments is also made freely available to support the reproducibility of the results.


Theoretical guarantees in KL for Diffusion Flow Matching

Neural Information Processing Systems

A significant task in statistics and machine learning currently revolves around generating samples from a target distribution that is only accessible via a dataset.