Related papers: Approximate maximizers of intricacy functionals
When constructing models of the world, we aim for optimal compressions: models that include as few details as possible while remaining as accurate as possible. But which details -- or features measured in data -- should we choose to include…
Estimating the entropy of a discrete random variable is a fundamental problem in information theory and related fields. This problem has many applications in various domains, including machine learning, statistics and data compression. Over…
We study the extent to which wide neural networks may be approximated by Gaussian processes when initialized with random weights. It is a well-established fact that as the width of a network goes to infinity, its law converges to that of a…
This paper presents a detailed theoretical analysis of the three stochastic approximation proximal gradient algorithms proposed in our companion paper [49] to set regularization parameters by marginal maximum likelihood estimation. We prove…
We consider the fundamental problem of how to automatically construct summary statistics for implicit generative models where the evaluation of the likelihood function is intractable, but sampling data from the model is possible. The idea…
As demonstrated in many areas of real-life applications, neural networks have the capability of dealing with high dimensional data. In the fields of optimal control and dynamical systems, the same capability was studied and verified in many…
We examine the necessary and sufficient complexity of neural networks to approximate functions from different smoothness spaces under the restriction of encodable network weights. Based on an entropy argument, we start by proving lower…
We exploit the idea to use the maximal-entropy method, successfully tested in information theory and statistical thermodynamics, to determine approximating function's coefficients and squared errors' weights simultaneously as output of one…
Maximum entropy methods provide a principled path connecting measurements of neural activity directly to statistical physics models, and this approach has been successful for populations of $N\sim 100$ neurons. As $N$ increases in new…
We discuss the computational complexity of approximating maximum a posteriori inference in sum-product networks. We first show NP-hardness in trees of height two by a reduction from maximum independent set; this implies non-approximability…
Optimization results are one method for understanding neural computation from Nature's perspective and for defining the physical limits on neuron-like engineering. Earlier work looks at individual properties or performance criteria and…
In this paper we study the adaptivity of submodular maximization. Adaptivity quantifies the number of sequential rounds that an algorithm makes when function evaluations can be executed in parallel. Adaptivity is a fundamental concept that…
Near-Gaussian probability densities are common in many important physical applications. Here we develop an asymptotic expansion methodology for computing entropic functionals for such densities. The expansion proposed is a close relative of…
Understanding how network function constrains neural connectivity is a central challenge in neuroscience. An influential approach is to train neural networks with gradient descent on cognitive tasks and characterize the resulting…
Diversity maximization aims to select a diverse and representative subset of items from a large dataset. It is a fundamental optimization task that finds applications in data summarization, feature selection, web search, recommender…
We consider approximation or recovery of functions based on a finite number of function evaluations. This is a well-studied problem in optimal recovery, machine learning, and numerical analysis in general, but many fundamental insights were…
In this report, we explore the data selection leading to a family of estimators maximizing a centrality. The family allows a nice properties leading to accurate and robust probability density function fitting according to some criteria we…
We develop a maximum relative entropy formalism to generate optimal approximations to probability distributions. The central results consist in (a) justifying the use of relative entropy as the uniquely natural criterion to select a…
Maximization of the entropy rate is an important issue to design diffusion processes aiming at a well-mixed state. We demonstrate that it is possible to construct maximal-entropy random walks with only local information on the graph…
We develop an asymptotic theory of adversarial estimators ('A-estimators'). They generalize maximum-likelihood-type estimators ('M-estimators') as their average objective is maximized by some parameters and minimized by others. This class…