Whilesomerecent works propose to distill an ensemble model into a single model to reduce such costs,thereisstillaperformance gapbetween theensemble anddistilledmodels.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) and its stochastic gradient versions are powerful algorithms for sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions. To sample from a distribution with density $\pi(\theta)\propto \exp(-U(\theta)) $, LMC iteratively generates the next sample by taking a step in the gradient direction $\nabla U$ with added Gaussian perturbations. Expectations w.r.t. the target distribution $\pi$ are estimated by averaging over LMC samples. In ordinary Monte Carlo, it is well known that the estimation error can be substantially reduced by replacing independent random samples by quasi-random samples like low-discrepancy sequences. In this work, we show that the estimation error of LMC can also be reduced by using quasi-random samples. Specifically, we propose to use completely uniformly distributed (CUD) sequences with certain low-discrepancy property to generate the Gaussian perturbations. Under smoothness and convexity conditions, we prove that LMC with a low-discrepancy CUD sequence achieves smaller error than standard LMC. The theoretical analysis is supported by compelling numerical experiments, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

The standard margin-based structured prediction commonly uses a maximum loss over all possible structured outputs. The large-margin formulation including latent variables not only results in a non-convex formulation but also increases the search space by a factor of the size of the latent space. Recent work has proposed the use of the maximum loss over random structured outputs sampled independently from some proposal distribution, with theoretical guarantees. We extend this work by including latent variables. We study a new family of loss functions under Gaussian perturbations and analyze the effect of the latent space on the generalization bounds. We show that the non-convexity of learning with latent variables originates naturally, as it relates to a tight upper bound of the Gibbs decoder distortion with respect to the latent space. Finally, we provide a formulation using random samples and relaxations that produces a tighter upper bound of the Gibbs decoder distortion up to a statistical accuracy, which enables a polynomial time evaluation of the objective function. We illustrate the method with synthetic experiments and a computer vision application.

We extend this work by including latent variables. We study a new family of loss functions under Gaussian perturbations and analyze the effect of the latent space on the generalization bounds.

Improving competent robot policies with on-policy RL is often hampered by noisy, low-signal gradients. We revisit Evolution Strategies (ES) as a policy-gradient proxy and localize exploration with bounded, antithetic triangular perturbations, suitable for policy refinement. We propose Triangular-Distribution ES (TD-ES) which pairs bounded triangular noise with a centered-rank finite-difference estimator to deliver stable, parallelizable, gradient-free updates. In a two-stage pipeline -- PPO pretraining followed by TD-ES refinement -- this preserves early sample efficiency while enabling robust late-stage gains. Across a suite of robotic manipulation tasks, TD-ES raises success rates by 26.5% relative to PPO and greatly reduces variance, offering a simple, compute-light path to reliable refinement.

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Social event detection involves identifying and categorizing important events from social media, which relies on labeled data, but annotation is costly and labor-intensive. To address this problem, we propose Augmentation framework for Social Event Detection (SED-Aug), a plug-and-play dual augmentation framework, which combines explicit text-based and implicit feature-space augmentation to enhance data diversity and model robustness. The explicit augmentation utilizes large language models to enhance textual information through five diverse generation strategies. For implicit augmentation, we design five novel perturbation techniques that operate in the feature space on structural fused embeddings. These perturbations are crafted to keep the semantic and relational properties of the embeddings and make them more diverse. Specifically, SED-Aug outperforms the best baseline model by approximately 17.67% on the Twitter2012 dataset and by about 15.57% on the Twitter2018 dataset in terms of the average F1 score. The code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/congboma/SED-Aug.