Latent signals are often obscured by measurement noise, yet encode the underlying laws and dynamics of complex systems; learning both the signals and their distributions remains a central challenge in scientific inference. The noise is often non-negligible, and the likelihoods for expressive generative models are often intractable. We utilize a convolutional maximum mean discrepancy (convMMD) loss and propose a likelihood-free framework for nonparametric density deconvolution and empirical Bayes denoising under additive measurement error. Our method learns a latent generative model by matching the observed data distribution to the noise-convolved model distribution. This yields a differentiable, simulation-based objective for multivariate homoscedastic or heteroscedastic noise, compatible with expressive sieve classes such as Gaussian mixtures and normalizing flows. The learned density then serves as an empirical prior for posterior denoising of individual latent values. Theoretically, we extend convMMD from parametric to nonparametric estimation, proving finite-sample bounds for empirical sieve minimizers and $L_2$ convergence rates under Sobolev smoothness. These rates recover the classical inverse-problem dependence: polynomial for ordinary-smooth and logarithmic for super-smooth noises. Our method provides a practical, theoretically grounded approach to deconvolution and denoising under generative latent distribution models.

Methods for split conformal prediction leverage calibration samples to transform any prediction rule into a set-prediction rule that complies with a target coverage probability. Existing methods provide remarkably strong performance guarantees with minimal computational costs. However, they require the use calibration samples composed by labeled examples different to those used for training. This requirement can be highly inconvenient, as it prevents the use of all labeled examples for training and may require acquiring additional labels solely for calibration. This paper presents an effective methodology for split conformal prediction with unsupervised calibration for classification tasks.

The rapidly expanding artificial intelligence (AI) industry has produced diverse yet powerful prediction tools, each with its own network architecture, training strategy, data-processing pipeline, and domain-specific strengths. These tools create new opportunities for semi-supervised inference, in which labeled data are limited and expensive to obtain, whereas unlabeled data are abundant and widely available. Given a collection of predictors, we treat them as a mixture of experts (MOE) and introduce an MOE-powered semi-supervised inference framework built upon prediction-powered inference (PPI). Motivated by the variance reduction principle underlying PPI, the proposed framework seeks the mixture of experts that achieves the smallest possible variance. Compared with standard PPI, the MOE-powered inference framework adapts to the unknown performance of individual predictors, benefits from their collective predictive power, and enjoys a best-expert guarantee. The framework is flexible and applies to mean estimation, linear regression, quantile estimation, and general M-estimation. We develop non-asymptotic theory for the MOE-powered inference framework and establish upper bounds on the coverage error of the resulting confidence intervals. Numerical experiments demonstrate the practical effectiveness of MOE-powered inference and corroborate our theoretical findings.

This supplementary document contains more additional experimental details and the technical proofs of convergence results of the NeurIPS'21 submission entitled "ATheory-Driven Self-Labeling Refinement Method for Contrastive Representation Learning". It is structured as follows. In Appendix A, we provides more experimental details, including training algorithm, network architecture, optimizer details, loss construction and training cost of SANE. Appendix B presents the proof and details of the main results, namely, Theorem 1, in Section 2, which analyzes the generalization performance of MoCo. Next, Appendix C introduces the proof roadmap and details of the main results, i.e.

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.

Joulani et al. (2013) have studied multi-armed bandits with delayed feedback under the assumption that the rewards are stochastic and the delays are sampled from a fixed distribution.

However, some recent studies haverecognized that most ofthese approaches failtoimprovethe performance over empirical risk minimization especially when applied to overparameterized neural networks.

It is structured as follows.

Althoughintuitive,sucha nativelabelassignment strategycannot revealtheunderlying semantic similarity between aquery anditspositivesandnegatives,andimpairs performance, since some negatives are semantically similar to the query or even share the same semantic class as the query.