Related papers: Optimal Algorithms for Testing Closeness of Discre…
We prove a general structural theorem for a wide family of local algorithms, which includes property testers, local decoders, and PCPs of proximity. Namely, we show that the structure of every algorithm that makes $q$ adaptive queries and…
Finite precision approximations of discrete probability distributions are considered, applicable for distribution synthesis, e.g., probabilistic shaping. Two algorithms are presented that find the optimal $M$-type approximation $Q$ of a…
Are two sets of observations drawn from the same distribution? This problem is a two-sample test. Kernel methods lead to many appealing properties. Indeed state-of-the-art approaches use the $L^2$ distance between kernel-based distribution…
Results on the hardness of approximate sampling are seen as important stepping stones towards a convincing demonstration of the superior computational power of quantum devices. The most prominent suggestions for such experiments include…
One of the main subjects of this paper is to study quantum property testing with local measurement. In particular, we establish a novel $\ell_2$ norm connection between quantum property testing problems and the corresponding distribution…
Probabilistic circuits (PCs) are a powerful modeling framework for representing tractable probability distributions over combinatorial spaces. In machine learning and probabilistic programming, one is often interested in understanding…
In this work, we study the problem of approximating the distance to subsequence-freeness in the sample-based distribution-free model. For a given subsequence (word) $w = w_1 \dots w_k$, a sequence (text) $T = t_1 \dots t_n$ is said to…
A $k$-modal probability distribution over the discrete domain $\{1,...,n\}$ is one whose histogram has at most $k$ "peaks" and "valleys." Such distributions are natural generalizations of monotone ($k=0$) and unimodal ($k=1$) probability…
We investigate distribution testing with access to non-adaptive conditional samples. In the conditional sampling model, the algorithm is given the following access to a distribution: it submits a query set $S$ to an oracle, which returns a…
We study robust testing and estimation of discrete distributions in the strong contamination model. We consider both the "centralized setting" and the "distributed setting with information constraints" including communication and local…
In this note, we revisit the recent work of Diakonikolas, Gouleakis, Kane, Peebles, and Price (2021), and provide an alternative proof of their main result. Our argument does not rely on any specific property of Poisson random variables…
We design a new, fast algorithm for agnostically learning univariate probability distributions whose densities are well approximated by piecewise polynomial functions. Let $f$ be the density function of an arbitrary univariate distribution,…
We initiate the study of hypothesis selection under local differential privacy. Given samples from an unknown probability distribution $p$ and a set of $k$ probability distributions $\mathcal{Q}$, we aim to output, under the constraints of…
The distance from calibration, introduced by B{\l}asiok, Gopalan, Hu, and Nakkiran (STOC 2023), has recently emerged as a central measure of miscalibration for probabilistic predictors. We study the fundamental problems of computing and…
In this paper we study the problem of computing max-entropy distributions over a discrete set of objects subject to observed marginals. Interest in such distributions arises due to their applicability in areas such as statistical physics,…
The $k$-of-$n$ testing problem involves performing $n$ independent tests sequentially, in order to determine whether/not at least $k$ tests pass. The objective is to minimize the expected cost of testing. This is a fundamental and…
We study the relative entropy between the empirical estimate of a discrete distribution and the true underlying distribution. If the minimum value of the probability mass function exceeds an $\alpha > 0$ (i.e. when the true underlying…
We consider the problem of identifying, from statistics, a distribution of discrete random variables $X_1,\ldots,X_n$ that is a mixture of $k$ product distributions. The best previous sample complexity for $n \in O(k)$ was $(1/\zeta)^{O(k^2…
The $\ell_2^2$ min-sum $k$-clustering problem is to partition an input set into clusters $C_1,\ldots,C_k$ to minimize $\sum_{i=1}^k\sum_{p,q\in C_i}\|p-q\|_2^2$. Although $\ell_2^2$ min-sum $k$-clustering is NP-hard, it is not known whether…
We examine the extent to which sublinear-sample property testing and estimation apply to settings where samples are independently but not identically distributed. Specifically, we consider the following distributional property testing…