Related papers: An Upper Confidence Bound Approach to Estimating t…

We propose a novel modification of the standard upper confidence bound (UCB) method for the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem which tunes the confidence bound of a given bandit based on its distance to others. Our UCB distance…

Simultaneous confidence bands (SCBs) for percentiles in linear regression are valuable tools with many applications. In this paper, we propose a novel criterion for comparing SCBs for percentiles, termed the Minimum Area Confidence Set…

We consider a discrete time stochastic model with infinite variance and study the mean estimation problem as in Wang and Ramdas (2023). We refine the Catoni-type confidence sequence (abbr. CS) and use an idea of Bhatt et al. (2022) to…

We give an asymptotic development of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), or any other estimator defined implicitly, in a way which involves the limiting behavior of the score and its higher-order derivatives. This development, which is…

Gaussian processes have become a promising tool for various safety-critical settings, since the posterior variance can be used to directly estimate the model error and quantify risk. However, state-of-the-art techniques for safety-critical…

An important component in deploying machine learning (ML) in safety-critic applications is having a reliable measure of confidence in the ML model's predictions. For a classifier $f$ producing a probability vector $f(x)$ over the candidate…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes settings, where overconfident responses can mislead users. Reliable confidence estimation has been shown to enhance trust and task accuracy. Yet existing methods face…

Bayesian bandit algorithms with approximate Bayesian inference have been widely used in real-world applications. However, there is a large discrepancy between the superior practical performance of these approaches and their theoretical…

We study uncertainty quantification for contextual stochastic optimization, focusing on weighted sample average approximation (wSAA), which uses machine-learned relevance weights based on covariates. Although wSAA is widely used for…

Probabilistic decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) often yields inconsistent outputs, particularly on complex or long-form questions. Self-Consistency (SC) mitigates this for short-form QA by majority voting over exact strings, whereas…

We analyze the fluctuations of incomplete $U$-statistics over a triangular array of independent random variables. We give criteria for a Central Limit Theorem (CLT, for short) to hold in the sense that we prove that an appropriately scaled…

To facilitate robust and trustworthy deployment of large language models (LLMs), it is essential to quantify the reliability of their generations through uncertainty estimation. While recent efforts have made significant advancements by…

In nonlinear deterministic parameter estimation, the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is unable to attain the Cramer-Rao lower bound at low and medium signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) due the threshold and ambiguity phenomena. In order to…

Finite sample bounds on the estimation error of the mean by the empirical mean, uniform over a class of functions, can often be conveniently obtained in terms of Rademacher or Gaussian averages of the class. If a function of n variables has…

In this paper, we discuss the asymptotic behavior of the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm in the context of multiarmed bandit problems and discuss its implication in downstream inferential tasks. While inferential tasks become…

We use the delta method and Stein's method to derive, under regularity conditions, explicit upper bounds for the distributional distance between the distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of a $d$-dimensional parameter and…

We present a new method for constructing a confidence interval for the mean of a bounded random variable from samples of the random variable. We conjecture that the confidence interval has guaranteed coverage, i.e., that it contains the…

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of using a constant stepsize in statistical inference via linear stochastic approximation (LSA) algorithms with Markovian data. After establishing a Central Limit Theorem (CLT), we outline an…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have notably enhanced the performance of Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA), yet their massive parameter scale leads to excessive resource consumption in training and inference, severely limiting…

Bayesian optimization usually assumes that a Bayesian prior is given. However, the strong theoretical guarantees in Bayesian optimization are often regrettably compromised in practice because of unknown parameters in the prior. In this…