real data
Learning Gaussian Mixtures with Generalised Linear Models: Precise Asymptotics in High-dimensions
Generalised linear models for multi-class classification problems are one of the fundamental building blocks of modern machine learning tasks. In this manuscript, we characterise the learning of a mixture of KGaussians with generic means and covariances via empirical risk minimisation (ERM) with any convex loss and regularisation. In particular, we prove exact asymptotics characterising the ERM estimator in high-dimensions, extending several previous results about Gaussian mixture classification in the literature. We exemplify our result in two tasks of interest in statistical learning: a) classification for a mixture with sparse means, where we study the efficiency of `1 penalty with respect to `2; b) max-margin multiclass classification, where we characterise the phase transition on the existence of the multi-class logistic maximum likelihood estimator for K >2. Finally, we discuss how our theory can be applied beyond the scope of synthetic data, showing that in different cases Gaussian mixtures capture closely the learning curve of classification tasks in real data sets.
architectures
A.1 Face experiments For the encoder, we use a resnet-50 backbone followed by projection heads that output pointwise, lower and upper quantile predictions. Each projection head consists of a convolution layer followed by a Leaky-Relu activation and a global average pooling layer. The input to each projection head is the output of the backbone network - a feature map of size 512 4 4 and the output dimension is the number of style dimensions - in the case of the pretrained FFHQ styleGAN2 used in our experiments, this value is 9088. For the generator, we use a FFHQ pretrained styleGAN2 trained to output faces of resolution 1024 1024 obtained from the official implementation. No discriminator is used during training.
GlucoSynth: Generating Differentially-Private Synthetic Glucose Traces Anonymous Author(s) Affiliation Address email
We focus on the problem of generating high-quality, private synthetic glucose1 traces, a task generalizable to many other time series sources. Existing methods for2 time series data synthesis, such as those using Generative Adversarial Networks3 (GANs), are not able to capture the innate characteristics of glucose data and cannot4 provide any formal privacy guarantees without severely degrading the utility of the5 synthetic data. In this paper we present GlucoSynth, a novel privacy-preserving6 GAN framework to generate synthetic glucose traces. The core intuition behind our7 approach is to conserve relationships amongst motifs (glucose events) within the8 traces, in addition to temporal dynamics. Our framework incorporates differential9 privacy mechanisms to provide strong formal privacy guarantees.
Benchmarking Tabular Foundation Models for Conditional Density Estimation in Regression
Izbicki, Rafael, Rodrigues, Pedro L. C.
Conditional density estimation (CDE) - recovering the full conditional distribution of a response given tabular covariates - is essential in settings with heteroscedasticity, multimodality, or asymmetric uncertainty. Recent tabular foundation models, such as TabPFN and TabICL, naturally produce predictive distributions, but their effectiveness as general-purpose CDE methods has not been systematically evaluated, unlike their performance for point prediction, which is well studied. We benchmark three tabular foundation model variants against a diverse set of parametric, tree-based, and neural CDE baselines on 39 real-world datasets, across training sizes from 50 to 20,000, using six metrics covering density accuracy, calibration, and computation time. Across all sample sizes, foundation models achieve the best CDE loss, log-likelihood, and CRPS on the large majority of datasets tested. Calibration is competitive at small sample sizes but, for some metrics and datasets, lags behind task-specific neural baselines at larger sample sizes, suggesting that post-hoc recalibration may be a valuable complement. In a photometric redshift case study using SDSS DR18, TabPFN exposed to 50,000 training galaxies outperforms all baselines trained on the full 500,000-galaxy dataset. Taken together, these results establish tabular foundation models as strong off-the-shelf conditional density estimators.
Self-Consuming Generative Models with Curated Data Provably Optimize Human Preferences
The rapid progress in generative models has resulted in impressive leaps in generation quality, blurring the lines between synthetic and real data. Web-scale datasets are now prone to the inevitable contamination by synthetic data, directly impacting the training of future generated models. Already, some theoretical results on self-consuming generative models (a.k.a., iterative retraining) have emerged in the literature, showcasing that either model collapse or stability could be possible depending on the fraction of generated data used at each retraining step. However, in practice, synthetic data is often subject to human feedback and curated by users before being used and uploaded online. For instance, many interfaces of popular text-to-image generative models, such as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, produce several variations of an image for a given query which can eventually be curated by the users. In this paper, we theoretically study the impact of data curation on iterated retraining of generative models and show that it can be seen as an implicit preference optimization mechanism.
Learning Temporal Point Processes via Reinforcement Learning
Social goods, such as healthcare, smart city, and information networks, often produce ordered event data in continuous time. The generative processes of these event data can be very complex, requiring flexible models to capture their dynamics. Temporal point processes offer an elegant framework for modeling event data without discretizing the time. However, the existing maximum-likelihood-estimation (MLE) learning paradigm requires hand-crafting the intensity function beforehand and cannot directly monitor the goodness-of-fit of the estimated model in the process of training. To alleviate the risk of model-misspecification in MLE, we propose to generate samples from the generative model and monitor the quality of the samples in the process of training until the samples and the real data are indistinguishable. We take inspiration from reinforcement learning (RL) and treat the generation of each event as the action taken by a stochastic policy. We parameterize the policy as a flexible recurrent neural network and gradually improve the policy to mimic the observed event distribution. Since the reward function is unknown in this setting, we uncover an analytic and nonparametric form of the reward function using an inverse reinforcement learning formulation. This new RL framework allows us to derive an efficient policy gradient algorithm for learning flexible point process models, and we show that it performs well in both synthetic and real data.