Related papers: CARMS: Categorical-Antithetic-REINFORCE Multi-Samp…

Estimating the gradients for binary variables is a task that arises frequently in various domains, such as training discrete latent variable models. What has been commonly used is a REINFORCE based Monte Carlo estimation method that uses…

To address the challenge of backpropagating the gradient through categorical variables, we propose the augment-REINFORCE-swap-merge (ARSM) gradient estimator that is unbiased and has low variance. ARSM first uses variable augmentation,…

To backpropagate the gradients through stochastic binary layers, we propose the augment-REINFORCE-merge (ARM) estimator that is unbiased, exhibits low variance, and has low computational complexity. Exploiting variable augmentation,…

Training models with discrete latent variables is challenging due to the difficulty of estimating the gradients accurately. Much of the recent progress has been achieved by taking advantage of continuous relaxations of the system, which are…

Due to the high variance of policy gradients, on-policy optimization algorithms are plagued with low sample efficiency. In this work, we propose Augment-Reinforce-Merge (ARM) policy gradient estimator as an unbiased low-variance alternative…

We consider covariate adjusted regression (CAR), a regression method for situations where predictors and response are observed after being distorted by a multiplicative factor. The distorting factors are unknown functions of an observable…

Learning in models with discrete latent variables is challenging due to high variance gradient estimators. Generally, approaches have relied on control variates to reduce the variance of the REINFORCE estimator. Recent work (Jang et al.…

Coarsely-labeled semantic segmentation annotations are easy to obtain, but therefore bear the risk of losing edge details and introducing background pixels. Impeded by the inherent noise, existing coarse annotations are only taken as a…

Language Models (LMs) are increasingly used in applications where generated outputs must satisfy strict semantic or syntactic constraints. Existing approaches to constrained generation fall along a spectrum: greedy constrained decoding…

Stochastic gradient-based optimisation for discrete latent variable models is challenging due to the high variance of gradients. We introduce a variance reduction technique for score function estimators that makes use of double control…

We derive an unbiased estimator for expectations over discrete random variables based on sampling without replacement, which reduces variance as it avoids duplicate samples. We show that our estimator can be derived as the…

We propose Learned Accept/Reject Sampling (LARS), a method for constructing richer priors using rejection sampling with a learned acceptance function. This work is motivated by recent analyses of the VAE objective, which pointed out that…

In this work, we propose CARLS, a novel framework for augmenting the capacity of existing deep learning frameworks by enabling multiple components -- model trainers, knowledge makers and knowledge banks -- to concertedly work together in an…

The Automated Model Evaluation (AutoEval) framework entertains the possibility of evaluating a trained machine learning model without resorting to a labeled testing set. Despite the promise and some decent results, the existing AutoEval…

Coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) spectroscopy is a powerful and rapid technique widely used in medicine, material science, and chemical analyses. However, its effectiveness is hindered by the presence of a non-resonant…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is essential for their applications. Recently, decoding-time alignment has emerged as an effective plug-and-play technique that avoids fine-tuning model parameters. This approach…

Comprehensive evaluation of machine learning models is the key to make sure that they perform as robustly and consistently as desired. In order to summarize the experimental results and pick a winner, Critical Difference (CD) diagrams are…

Importance sampling (IS) is a powerful Monte Carlo methodology for the approximation of intractable integrals, very often involving a target probability density function. The performance of IS heavily depends on the appropriate selection of…

Our paper discovers a new trade-off of using regression adjustments (RAs) in causal inference under covariate-adaptive randomizations (CARs). On one hand, RAs can improve the efficiency of causal estimators by incorporating information from…

Coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) microspectroscopy has demonstrated significant potential for biological and materials imaging. To date, however, the primary mechanism of disseminating CARS spectroscopic information is through…