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LLMs are increasingly used to make or support high-stakes decisions under uncertainty, where alignment depends not only on factual accuracy but on how models weigh tradeoffs between different outcomes. We present an empirical pipeline for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Khurram Yamin , Jingjing Tang , Eric Horvitz , Bryan Wilder

Choice modeling has been a central topic in the study of individual preference or utility across many fields including economics, marketing, operations research, and psychology. While the vast majority of the literature on choice models has…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-22 Zhongze Cai , Hanzhao Wang , Kalyan Talluri , Xiaocheng Li

Preference learning, or the task of aligning generative models to preference comparison data, has yet to reach the conceptual maturity of classification, density estimation, etc. To close this gap, this work presents a framework to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Lily H. Zhang , Rajesh Ranganath

Large language models are increasingly used to predict human preferences in both scientific and business endeavors, yet current approaches rely exclusively on analyzing model outputs without considering the underlying mechanisms. Using…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Sarah Ball , Simeon Allmendinger , Niklas Kühl , Frauke Kreuter

Popular debiased estimation methods for causal inference -- such as augmented inverse propensity weighting and targeted maximum likelihood estimation -- enjoy desirable asymptotic properties like statistical efficiency and double robustness…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-16 Tiffany Tianhui Cai , Yuri Fonseca , Kaiwen Hou , Hongseok Namkoong

Conjoint experiments randomize multidimensional profiles, offering a powerful design for recovering structural preference parameters -- including marginal rates of substitution, willingness to pay, and the distribution of preferences across…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-26 Avidit Acharya , Jens Hainmueller , Yiqing Xu

Current instruction-tuned language models are exclusively trained with textual preference data and thus are often not aligned with the unique requirements of other modalities, such as speech. To better align language models with the speech…

Selective inference (post-selection inference) is a methodology that has attracted much attention in recent years in the fields of statistics and machine learning. Naive inference based on data that are also used for model selection tends…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-25 Yoshiyuki Ninomiya , Yuta Umezu , Ichiro Takeuchi

We consider the problem of subspace estimation in situations where the number of available snapshots and the observation dimension are comparable in magnitude. In this context, traditional subspace methods tend to fail because the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-11-15 Pascal Vallet , Philippe Loubaton , Xavier Mestre

We propose a general methodology for recovering preference parameters from data on choices and response times. Our methods yield estimates with fast ($1/n$ for $n$ data points) convergence rates when specialized to the popular Drift…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-08-04 Federico Echenique , Alireza Fallah , Michael I. Jordan

Aligning text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models with human preferences has emerged as a critical research challenge. While recent advances in this area have extended preference optimization techniques from large language models (LLMs) to the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Junyong Kang , Seohyun Lim , Kyungjune Baek , Hyunjung Shim

We propose and analyze estimators for statistical functionals of one or more distributions under nonparametric assumptions. Our estimators are based on the theory of influence functions, which appear in the semiparametric statistics…

Preference-based reward learning is a popular technique for teaching robots and autonomous systems how a human user wants them to perform a task. Previous works have shown that actively synthesizing preference queries to maximize…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Evan Ellis , Gaurav R. Ghosal , Stuart J. Russell , Anca Dragan , Erdem Bıyık

Recent advancements in text-to-speech (TTS) have shown that language model (LM)-based systems offer competitive performance to their counterparts. Further optimization can be achieved through preference alignment algorithms, which adjust…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-20 Jinchuan Tian , Chunlei Zhang , Jiatong Shi , Hao Zhang , Jianwei Yu , Shinji Watanabe , Dong Yu

The preferential attachment (PA) model is a popular way of modeling dynamic social networks, such as collaboration networks. Assuming that the PA function takes a parametric form, we propose and study the maximum likelihood estimator of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-08-17 Fengnan Gao , Aad van der Vaart

Distributional regression aims to find the best candidate in a given parametric family of conditional distributions to model a given dataset. As each candidate in the distribution family can be identified by the corresponding distribution…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-18 Gitte Kremling , Gerhard Dikta

This paper presents a pre-processing and a distance which improve the performance of machine learning algorithms working on independent and identically distributed stochastic processes. We introduce a novel non-parametric approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-04 Gautier Marti , Philippe Very , Philippe Donnat

Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-13 Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

Reward models are crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intentions. Existing approaches follow either Generative (GRMs) or Discriminative (DRMs) paradigms, yet both suffer from limitations: GRMs typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Longze Chen , Lu Wang , Renke Shan , Ze Gong , Run Luo , Jiaming Li , Jing Luo , Qiyao Wang , Min Yang

Learning from human preferences is a cornerstone of aligning machine learning models with subjective human judgments. Yet, collecting such preference data is often costly and time-consuming, motivating the need for more efficient learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Matteo Cercola , Valeria Capretti , Simone Formentin