Related papers: A Large-Deviation Analysis of the Maximum-Likeliho…

Parameter estimation in Markov random fields (MRFs) is a difficult task, in which inference over the network is run in the inner loop of a gradient descent procedure. Replacing exact inference with approximate methods such as loopy belief…

This paper studies the problem of estimation from relative measurements in a graph, in which a vector indexed over the nodes has to be reconstructed from pairwise measurements of differences between its components associated to nodes…

The standard paradigm of neural language generation adopts maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) as the optimizing method. From a distributional view, MLE in fact minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) between the distribution of the…

We consider the branch-length estimation problem on a bifurcating tree: a character evolves along the edges of a binary tree according to a two-state symmetric Markov process, and we seek to recover the edge transition probabilities from…

In chaotic dynamical systems such as the weather, prediction errors grow faster in some situations than in others. Real-time knowledge about the error growth could enable strategies to adjust the modelling and forecasting infrastructure…

This study introduces the Misclassification Likelihood Matrix (MLM) as a novel tool for quantifying the reliability of neural network predictions under distribution shifts. The MLM is obtained by leveraging softmax outputs and clustering…

The detection of hidden two-dimensional Gauss-Markov random fields using sensor networks is considered. Under a conditional autoregressive model, the error exponent for the Neyman-Pearson detector satisfying a fixed level constraint is…

Loss tomography has received considerable attention in recent years and a number of estimators have been proposed. Unfortunately, almost all of them are devoted to the tree topology despite the general topology is more common in practice.…

Distance metric learning (DML) approaches learn a transformation to a representation space where distance is in correspondence with a predefined notion of similarity. While such models offer a number of compelling benefits, it has been…

Loss tomography has received considerable attention in recent years and a number of estimators based on maximum likelihood (ML) or Bayesian principles have been proposed. Almost all of the estimators are devoted to the tree topology despite…

For the tree topology, previous studies show the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) of a link/path takes a polynomial form with a degree that is one less than the number of descendants connected to the link/path. Since then, the main concern…

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is vital for developing machine learning based models for critical safety systems. Common approaches for OOD detection assume access to some OOD samples during training which may not be available…

We study off-dynamics Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the policy is trained on a source domain and deployed to a distinct target domain. We aim to solve this problem via online distributionally robust Markov decision processes (DRMDPs),…

Unlike the ordinary least-squares (OLS) estimator for the linear model, a ridge regression linear model provides coefficient estimates via shrinkage, usually with improved mean-square and prediction error. This is true especially when the…

This study investigates the effects of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling in unsupervised Maximum Likelihood (ML) learning. Our attention is restricted to the family of unnormalized probability densities for which the negative log…

The minimum spanning tree (MST) is a combinatorial optimization problem: given a connected graph with a real weight ("cost") on each edge, find the spanning tree that minimizes the sum of the total cost of the occupied edges. We consider…

Consider the nonparametric logistic regression problem. In the logistic regression, we usually consider the maximum likelihood estimator, and the excess risk is the expectation of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the true and…

The Chow-Liu algorithm (IEEE Trans.~Inform.~Theory, 1968) has been a mainstay for the learning of tree-structured graphical models from i.i.d.\ sampled data vectors. Its theoretical properties have been well-studied and are well-understood.…

We consider the problem of learning classification trees that are robust to distribution shifts between training and testing/deployment data. This problem arises frequently in high stakes settings such as public health and social work where…

We study the problem of learning sparse structure changes between two Markov networks $P$ and $Q$. Rather than fitting two Markov networks separately to two sets of data and figuring out their differences, a recent work proposed to learn…