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Greedy algorithms are widely used for problems in machine learning such as feature selection and set function optimization. Unfortunately, for large datasets, the running time of even greedy algorithms can be quite high. This is because for…
Text embeddings are essential for many tasks, such as document retrieval, clustering, and semantic similarity assessment. In this paper, we study how to contrastively train text embedding models in a compute-optimal fashion, given a suite…
Language models can be prompted to perform a wide variety of zero- and few-shot learning problems. However, performance varies significantly with the choice of prompt, and we do not yet understand why this happens or how to pick the best…
Inference-time computation offers a powerful axis for scaling the performance of language models. However, naively increasing computation in techniques like Best-of-N sampling can lead to performance degradation due to reward hacking.…
Greedy algorithms have been successfully analyzed and applied in training neural networks for solving variational problems, ensuring guaranteed convergence orders. In this paper, we extend the analysis of the orthogonal greedy algorithm…
The greedy algorithm adapted from Kruskal's algorithm is an efficient and folklore way to produce a $k$-spanner with girth at least $k+2$. The greedy algorithm has shown to be `existentially optimal', while it's not `universally optimal'…
Extracting dense representations for terms and phrases is a task of great importance for knowledge discovery platforms targeting highly-technical fields. Dense representations are used as features for downstream components and have multiple…
Considering the set cover problem, by modifying the approach that gives a logarithmic approximation guarantee for the greedy algorithm, we obtain an estimation of the greedy algorithm's accuracy for a particular input. We compare the…
Thinking aloud is an effective meta-cognitive strategy human reasoners apply to solve difficult problems. We suggest to improve the reasoning ability of pre-trained neural language models in a similar way, namely by expanding a task's…
Active learning is increasingly adopted for expensive multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems, but it involves a challenging subset selection problem, optimizing the batch acquisition score that quantifies the goodness of a…
Generative machine reading comprehension (MRC) requires a model to generate well-formed answers. For this type of MRC, answer generation method is crucial to the model performance. However, generative models, which are supposed to be the…
In many prediction problems, it is not uncommon that the number of variables used to construct a forecast is of the same order of magnitude as the sample size, if not larger. We then face the problem of constructing a prediction in the…
Motivated by the importance of explainability in modern machine learning, we design bandit algorithms that are efficient and interpretable. A bandit algorithm is interpretable if it explores with the objective of reducing uncertainty in the…
In distributed optimization problems, a technique called gradient coding, which involves replicating data points, has been used to mitigate the effect of straggling machines. Recent work has studied approximate gradient coding, which…
Decoding from the output distributions of large language models to produce high-quality text is a complex challenge in language modeling. Various approaches, such as beam search, sampling with temperature, $k-$sampling, nucleus…
The performance of acquisition functions for Bayesian optimisation to locate the global optimum of continuous functions is investigated in terms of the Pareto front between exploration and exploitation. We show that Expected Improvement…
Despite the great success of deep learning, recent works show that large deep neural networks are often highly redundant and can be significantly reduced in size. However, the theoretical question of how much we can prune a neural network…
Submodular function maximization finds application in a variety of real-world decision-making problems. However, most existing methods, based on greedy maximization, assume it is computationally feasible to evaluate F, the function being…
Experimental evidence indicates that simple models outperform complex deep networks on many unsupervised similarity tasks. We provide a simple yet rigorous explanation for this behaviour by introducing the concept of an optimal…
We study the problem of selecting a subset of k random variables from a large set, in order to obtain the best linear prediction of another variable of interest. This problem can be viewed in the context of both feature selection and sparse…