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Sampling algorithms play an important role in controlling the quality and runtime of diffusion model inference. In recent years, a number of works~\cite{chen2023sampling,chen2023ode,benton2023error,lee2022convergence} have proposed schemes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Shivam Gupta , Linda Cai , Sitan Chen

Multi-distribution learning extends agnostic Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning to the setting in which a family of $k$ distributions, $\{D_i\}_{i\in[k]}$, is considered and a classifier's performance is measured by its error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Chicheng Zhang , Yihan Zhou

We study the problem of testing discrete distributions with a focus on the high probability regime. Specifically, given samples from one or more discrete distributions, a property $\mathcal{P}$, and parameters $0< \epsilon, \delta <1$, we…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Ilias Diakonikolas , Themis Gouleakis , Daniel M. Kane , John Peebles , Eric Price

We provide improved differentially private algorithms for identity testing of high-dimensional distributions. Specifically, for $d$-dimensional Gaussian distributions with known covariance $\Sigma$, we can test whether the distribution…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Shyam Narayanan

It is often necessary to make sampling-based statistical inference about many probability distributions in parallel. Given a finite computational resource, this article addresses how to optimally divide sampling effort between the samplers…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-02-18 Nicholas Heard , Melissa Turcotte

Estimating the density of a distribution from its samples is a fundamental problem in statistics. Hypothesis selection addresses the setting where, in addition to a sample set, we are given $n$ candidate distributions -- referred to as…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Zhan Shi , Ria Stevens , Vincent X. Wang

We initiate an investigation of private sampling from distributions. Given a dataset with $n$ independent observations from an unknown distribution $P$, a sampling algorithm must output a single observation from a distribution that is close…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Sofya Raskhodnikova , Satchit Sivakumar , Adam Smith , Marika Swanberg

We propose a fundamental metric for measuring the distance between two distributions. This metric, referred to as the decision-focused (DF) divergence, is tailored to stochastic linear optimization problems in which the objective…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-04 Suhan Liu , Mo Liu

Given samples from an unknown multivariate distribution $p$, is it possible to distinguish whether $p$ is the product of its marginals versus $p$ being far from every product distribution? Similarly, is it possible to distinguish whether…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-07-12 Constantinos Daskalakis , Nishanth Dikkala , Gautam Kamath

The paper introduces a new kernel-based Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) statistic for measuring the distance between two distributions given finitely-many multivariate samples. When the distributions are locally low-dimensional, the proposed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-09-03 Xiuyuan Cheng , Alexander Cloninger , Ronald R. Coifman

In the mixture models problem it is assumed that there are $K$ distributions $\theta_{1},\ldots,\theta_{K}$ and one gets to observe a sample from a mixture of these distributions with unknown coefficients. The goal is to associate instances…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-12-02 Jason D Lee , Ran Gilad-Bachrach , Rich Caruana

We consider the fundamental problem of estimating a discrete distribution on a domain of size $K$ with high probability in Kullback-Leibler divergence. We provide upper and lower bounds on the minimax estimation rate, which show that the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-23 Dirk van der Hoeven , Julia Olkhovskaia , Tim van Erven

We use the Sum of Squares method to develop new efficient algorithms for learning well-separated mixtures of Gaussians and robust mean estimation, both in high dimensions, that substantially improve upon the statistical guarantees achieved…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-11-21 Samuel B. Hopkins , Jerry Li

We study the problem of approximating the total variation distance between two mixtures of product distributions over an $n$-dimensional discrete domain. Given two mixtures $\mathbb{P}$ and $\mathbb{Q}$ with $k_1$ and $k_2$ product…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Weiming Feng , Yucheng Fu , Minji Yang , Anqi Zhang

One of the most fundamental problems in distribution testing is the identity testing problem: given samples $x_1,\ldots,x_s$, the goal is to determine whether the samples are drawn from a target distribution $\mathcal{D}$. When…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-15 Bruno Cavalar , Eli Goldin , Matthew Gray , Taiga Hiroka , Min-Hsiu Hsieh , Tomoyuki Morimae

The problem of estimating an unknown discrete distribution from its samples is a fundamental tenet of statistical learning. Over the past decade, it attracted significant research effort and has been solved for a variety of divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Yi Hao , Alon Orlitsky , Venkatadheeraj Pichapati

We study distribution-free property testing and learning problems where the unknown probability distribution is a product distribution over $\mathbb{R}^d$. For many important classes of functions, such as intersections of halfspaces,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Nathaniel Harms , Yuichi Yoshida

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Shivam Garg , Chirag Pabbaraju , Kirankumar Shiragur , Gregory Valiant

The discrepancy between two independent samples \(X_1,\dots,X_n\) and \(Y_1,\dots,Y_n\) drawn from the same distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d$ typically has order \(O(\sqrt{n})\) even in one dimension. We give a simple online algorithm that…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-01-23 Gleb Smirnov , Roman Vershynin

We study the density estimation problem defined as follows: given $k$ distributions $p_1, \ldots, p_k$ over a discrete domain $[n]$, as well as a collection of samples chosen from a ``query'' distribution $q$ over $[n]$, output $p_i$ that…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Anders Aamand , Alexandr Andoni , Justin Y. Chen , Piotr Indyk , Shyam Narayanan , Sandeep Silwal , Haike Xu