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This technical report studies the problem of ranking from pairwise comparisons in the classical Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model, with a focus on score estimation. For general graphs, we show that, with sufficiently many samples, maximum…
A $k$-modal probability distribution over the discrete domain $\{1,...,n\}$ is one whose histogram has at most $k$ "peaks" and "valleys." Such distributions are natural generalizations of monotone ($k=0$) and unimodal ($k=1$) probability…
A key element of any machine learning algorithm is the use of a function that measures the dis/similarity between data points. Given a task, such a function can be optimized with a metric learning algorithm. Although this research field has…
The methods of statistical physics are widely used for modelling complex networks. Building on the recently proposed Equilibrium Expectation approach, we derive a simple and efficient algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of…
Factor analysis, a classical multivariate statistical technique is popularly used as a fundamental tool for dimensionality reduction in statistics, econometrics and data science. Estimation is often carried out via the Maximum Likelihood…
We present a novel Bayesian topic model for learning discourse-level document structure. Our model leverages insights from discourse theory to constrain latent topic assignments in a way that reflects the underlying organization of document…
A number of applications (e.g., AI bot tournaments, sports, peer grading, crowdsourcing) use pairwise comparison data and the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model to evaluate a given collection of items (e.g., bots, teams, students, search…
We examine a new form of smooth approximation to the zero one loss in which learning is performed using a reformulation of the widely used logistic function. Our approach is based on using the posterior mean of a novel generalized…
Comprehensive evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) is an open research problem. Existing evaluations rely on deterministic point estimates generated via greedy decoding. However, we find that deterministic evaluations fail to capture…
Marginal-likelihood based model-selection, even though promising, is rarely used in deep learning due to estimation difficulties. Instead, most approaches rely on validation data, which may not be readily available. In this work, we present…
Maximum likelihood is the most widely used statistical estimation technique. Recent work by the authors introduced a general methodology for the construction of estimators for functionals in parametric models, and demonstrated improvements…
This paper considers ranking inference of $n$ items based on the observed data on the top choice among $M$ randomly selected items at each trial. This is a useful modification of the Plackett-Luce model for $M$-way ranking with only the top…
Forecasting complex vehicle and pedestrian multi-modal distributions requires powerful probabilistic approaches. Normalizing flows (NF) have recently emerged as an attractive tool to model such distributions. However, a key drawback is that…
Choice behavior and preferences typically involve numerous and subjective aspects that are difficult to be identified and quantified. For this reason, their exploration is frequently conducted through the collection of ordinal evidence in…
We study the problem of supervised learning a metric space under discriminative constraints. Given a universe $X$ and sets ${\cal S}, {\cal D}\subset {X \choose 2}$ of similar and dissimilar pairs, we seek to find a mapping $f:X\to Y$, into…
This study introduces the Misclassification Likelihood Matrix (MLM) as a novel tool for quantifying the reliability of neural network predictions under distribution shifts. The MLM is obtained by leveraging softmax outputs and clustering…
Linear mixed models (LMMs), which incorporate fixed and random effects, are key tools for analyzing heterogeneous data, such as in personalized medicine. Nowadays, this type of data is increasingly wide, sometimes containing thousands of…
A learned generative model often produces biased statistics relative to the underlying data distribution. A standard technique to correct this bias is importance sampling, where samples from the model are weighted by the likelihood ratio…
Preference alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved their ability to adhere to human instructions and intentions. However, existing direct alignment algorithms primarily focus on relative preferences and often…
This paper introduces distribution-based prediction, a novel approach to using Large Language Models (LLMs) as predictive tools by interpreting output token probabilities as distributions representing the models' learned representation of…