Goto

Collaborating Authors

 curran associate


Score-basedGenerativeNeuralNetworksfor Large-ScaleOptimalTransport

Neural Information Processing Systems

Comparison of statistical distances can also enable distribution testing, quantification of distribution shifts, and provide methods to correct for distribution shift through domainadaptation[12]. Optimal transport theory provides a rich set of tools for comparing distributions inWasserstein Distance.


Collective Kernel EFT for Pre-activation ResNets

Kawase, Hidetoshi, Ota, Toshihiro

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In finite-width deep neural networks, the empirical kernel $G$ evolves stochastically across layers. We develop a collective kernel effective field theory (EFT) for pre-activation ResNets based on a $G$-only closure hierarchy and diagnose its finite validity window. Exploiting the exact conditional Gaussianity of residual increments, we derive an exact stochastic recursion for $G$. Applying Gaussian approximations systematically yields a continuous-depth ODE system for the mean kernel $K_0$, the kernel covariance $V_4$, and the $1/n$ mean correction $K_{1,\mathrm{EFT}}$, which emerges diagrammatically as a one-loop tadpole correction. Numerically, $K_0$ remains accurate at all depths. However, the $V_4$ equation residual accumulates to an $O(1)$ error at finite time, primarily driven by approximation errors in the $G$-only transport term. Furthermore, $K_{1,\mathrm{EFT}}$ fails due to the breakdown of the source closure, which exhibits a systematic mismatch even at initialization. These findings highlight the limitations of $G$-only state-space reduction and suggest extending the state space to incorporate the sigma-kernel.


Generalization Guarantees on Data-Driven Tuning of Gradient Descent with Langevin Updates

Goyal, Saumya, Rongali, Rohith, Ray, Ritabrata, Póczos, Barnabás

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study learning to learn for regression problems through the lens of hyperparameter tuning. We propose the Langevin Gradient Descent Algorithm (LGD), which approximates the mean of the posterior distribution defined by the loss function and regularizer of a convex regression task. We prove the existence of an optimal hyperparameter configuration for which the LGD algorithm achieves the Bayes' optimal solution for squared loss. Subsequently, we study generalization guarantees on meta-learning optimal hyperparameters for the LGD algorithm from a given set of tasks in the data-driven setting. For a number of parameters $d$ and hyperparameter dimension $h$, we show a pseudo-dimension bound of $O(dh)$, upto logarithmic terms under mild assumptions on LGD. This matches the dimensional dependence of the bounds obtained in prior work for the elastic net, which only allows for $h=2$ hyperparameters, and extends their bounds to regression on convex loss. Finally, we show empirical evidence of the success of LGD and the meta-learning procedure for few-shot learning on linear regression using a few synthetically created datasets.


Ordinary Least Squares is a Special Case of Transformer

Tan, Xiaojun, Zhao, Yuchen

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The statistical essence of the Transformer architecture has long remained elusive: Is it a universal approximator, or a neural network version of known computational algorithms? Through rigorous algebraic proof, we show that the latter better describes Transformer's basic nature: Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) is a special case of the single-layer Linear Transformer. Using the spectral decomposition of the empirical covariance matrix, we construct a specific parameter setting where the attention mechanism's forward pass becomes mathematically equivalent to the OLS closed-form projection. This means attention can solve the problem in one forward pass, not by iterating. Building upon this prototypical case, we further uncover a decoupled slow and fast memory mechanism within Transformers. Finally, the evolution from our established linear prototype to standard Transformers is discussed. This progression facilitates the transition of the Hopfield energy function from linear to exponential memory capacity, thereby establishing a clear continuity between modern deep architectures and classical statistical inference.


Monte Carlo Stochastic Depth for Uncertainty Estimation in Deep Learning

Müller, Adam T., Rögelein, Tobias, Stache, Nicolaj C.

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The deployment of deep neural networks in safety-critical systems necessitates reliable and efficient uncertainty quantification (UQ). A practical and widespread strategy for UQ is repurposing stochastic regularizers as scalable approximate Bayesian inference methods, such as Monte Carlo Dropout (MCD) and MC-DropBlock (MCDB). However, this paradigm remains under-explored for Stochastic Depth (SD), a regularizer integral to the residual-based backbones of most modern architectures. While prior work demonstrated its empirical promise for segmentation, a formal theoretical connection to Bayesian variational inference and a benchmark on complex, multi-task problems like object detection are missing. In this paper, we first provide theoretical insights connecting Monte Carlo Stochastic Depth (MCSD) to principled approximate variational inference. We then present the first comprehensive empirical benchmark of MCSD against MCD and MCDB on state-of-the-art detectors (YOLO, RT-DETR) using the COCO and COCO-O datasets. Our results position MCSD as a robust and computationally efficient method that achieves highly competitive predictive accuracy (mAP), notably yielding slight improvements in calibration (ECE) and uncertainty ranking (AUARC) compared to MCD. We thus establish MCSD as a theoretically-grounded and empirically-validated tool for efficient Bayesian approximation in modern deep learning.