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Feature learning via mean-field Langevin dynamics: classifying sparse parities and beyond Taiji Suzuki 1,2, Denny Wu

Neural Information Processing Systems

Langevin dynamics (MFLD) (Mei et al., 2018; Hu et al., 2019) is particularly attractive due to the MFLD arises from a noisy gradient descent update on the parameters, where Gaussian noise is injected to the gradient to encourage "exploration". Furthermore, uniform-in-time estimates of the particle discretization error have also been established (Suzuki et al., The goal of this work is to address the following question.



Provably Reliable Classifier Guidance through Cross-entropy Error Control

Sahu, Sharan, Banerjee, Arisina, Wu, Yuchen

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Classifier-guided diffusion models generate conditional samples by augmenting the reverse-time score with the gradient of a learned classifier, yet it remains unclear whether standard classifier training procedures yield effective diffusion guidance. We address this gap by showing that, under mild smoothness assumptions on the classifiers, controlling the cross-entropy error at each diffusion step also controls the error of the resulting guidance vectors: classifiers achieving conditional KL divergence $\varepsilon^2$ from the ground-truth conditional label probabilities induce guidance vectors with mean squared error $\widetilde{O}(d \varepsilon )$. Our result yields an upper bound on the sampling error under classifier guidance and bears resemblance to a reverse log-Sobolev-type inequality. Moreover, we show that the classifier smoothness assumption is essential, by constructing simple counterexamples demonstrating that, without it, control of the guidance vector can fail for almost all distributions. To our knowledge, our work establishes the first quantitative link between classifier training and guidance alignment, yielding both a theoretical foundation for classifier guidance and principled guidelines for classifier selection.


Decision Tree Embedding by Leaf-Means

Shen, Cencheng, Dong, Yuexiao, Priebe, Carey E.

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Decision trees and random forest remain highly competitive for classification on medium-sized, standard datasets due to their robustness, minimal preprocessing requirements, and interpretability. However, a single tree suffers from high estimation variance, while large ensembles reduce this variance at the cost of substantial computational overhead and diminished interpretability. In this paper, we propose Decision Tree Embedding (DTE), a fast and effective method that leverages the leaf partitions of a trained classification tree to construct an interpretable feature representation. By using the sample means within each leaf region as anchor points, DTE maps inputs into an embedding space defined by the tree's partition structure, effectively circumventing the high variance inherent in decision-tree splitting rules. We further introduce an ensemble extension based on additional bootstrap trees, and pair the resulting embedding with linear discriminant analysis for classification. We establish several population-level theoretical properties of DTE, including its preservation of conditional density under mild conditions and a characterization of the resulting classification error. Empirical studies on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that DTE strikes a strong balance between accuracy and computational efficiency, outperforming or matching random forest and shallow neural networks while requiring only a fraction of their training time in most cases. Overall, the proposed DTE method can be viewed either as a scalable decision tree classifier that improves upon standard split rules, or as a neural network model whose weights are learned from tree-derived anchor points, achieving an intriguing integration of both paradigms.


Hierarchical Clustering Beyond the Worst-Case

Vincent Cohen-Addad, Varun Kanade, Frederik Mallmann-Trenn

Neural Information Processing Systems

Finally, we report empirical evaluation on synthetic and real-world data showing that our proposed SVD-based method does indeed achieve a better cost than other widely-used heurstics and also results in a better classification accuracy when the underlying problem was that of multi-class classification.