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This work proposes a new exchangeability test for a random sequence through a martingale based approach. Its main contributions include: 1) an additive martingale which is more amenable for designing exchangeability tests by exploiting the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-07-27 Liang Dai , Mohamed-Rafik Bouguelia

Memory-based meta-learning is a technique for approximating Bayes-optimal predictors. Under fairly general conditions, minimizing sequential prediction error, measured by the log loss, leads to implicit meta-learning. The goal of this work…

This is an up-to-date introduction to and overview of the Minimum Description Length (MDL) Principle, a theory of inductive inference that can be applied to general problems in statistics, machine learning and pattern recognition. While MDL…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-12-19 Peter Grünwald , Teemu Roos

Meta-learning methods perform well on new within-distribution tasks but often fail when adapting to out-of-distribution target tasks, where transfer from source tasks can induce negative transfer. We propose a causally-aware Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Lotta Mäkinen , Jorge Loría , Samuel Kaski

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with next-token prediction, implemented in autoregressive Transformers via causal masking for parallelism. This creates a subtle misalignment: residual connections tie activations to the current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jonathan Lys , Vincent Gripon , Bastien Pasdeloup , Axel Marmoret , Lukas Mauch , Fabien Cardinaux , Ghouthi Boukli Hacene

Despite large language models' (LLMs) recent advancements, their bias and hallucination issues persist, and their ability to offer consistent preferential rankings remains underexplored. This study investigates the capacity of LLMs to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Xiutian Zhao , Ke Wang , Wei Peng

This paper introduces a novel Bayesian learning model to explain the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on their core optimization metric of next token prediction. We develop a theoretical framework based on an ideal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Siddhartha Dalal , Vishal Misra

We argue for the use of separate exchangeability as a modeling principle in Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) inference. Separate exchangeability is de facto widely applied in the Bayesian parametric case, e.g., it naturally arises in simple…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-29 Giovanni Rebaudo , Qiaohui Lin , Peter Mueller

With the increase in availability of large pre-trained language models (LMs) in Natural Language Processing (NLP), it becomes critical to assess their fit for a specific target task a priori - as fine-tuning the entire space of available…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Elisa Bassignana , Max Müller-Eberstein , Mike Zhang , Barbara Plank

Intelligent agents must be able to articulate its own uncertainty. In this work, we show that pre-trained sequence models are naturally capable of probabilistic reasoning over exchangeable data points -- forming informed beliefs and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-02 Naimeng Ye , Hongseok Namkoong

Uncertainty-aware machine learners, such as Bayesian neural networks, output a quantification of uncertainty instead of a point prediction. We provide uncertainty-aware learners with a principled framework to characterize, and identify ways…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Sabina J. Sloman , Michele Caprio , Samuel Kaski

We introduce a general Bayesian framework for graph matching grounded in a new theory of exchangeable random permutations. Leveraging the cycle representation of permutations and the literature on exchangeable random partitions, we define,…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-03 Francesco Gaffi , Nathaniel Josephs , Lizhen Lin

Recent progress has rapidly advanced our understanding of the mechanisms underlying in-context learning in modern attention-based neural networks. However, existing results focus exclusively on unimodal data; in contrast, the theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 Nicholas Barnfield , Subhabrata Sen , Pragya Sur

Supervised machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms excel at predictive tasks, but it is commonly assumed that they often do so by exploiting non-causal correlations, which may limit both interpretability and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-21 Maximilian Pichler , Florian Hartig

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit unexpected errors or unintended behavior, even at scale. While recent work reveals the discrepancy between LLMs and humans in skill compositions, the learning dynamics of skill compositions and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Xingyu Zhao , Darsh Sharma , Rheeya Uppaal , Yiqiao Zhong

Although machine learning (ML) models of AI achieve high performances in medicine, they are not free of errors. Empowering clinicians to identify incorrect model recommendations is crucial for engendering trust in medical AI. Explainable AI…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Isil Guzey , Ozlem Ucar , Nukhet Aladag Ciftdemir , Betul Acunas

By transferring knowledge learned from seen/previous tasks, meta learning aims to generalize well to unseen/future tasks. Existing meta-learning approaches have shown promising empirical performance on various multiclass classification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Jiechao Guan , Zhiwu Lu , Tao Xiang , Timothy Hospedales

In inference problems involving a multi-dimensional parameter $\theta$, it is often natural to consider decision rules that have a risk which is invariant under some group $G$ of permutations of $\theta$. We show that this implies that the…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-07-01 Erik van Zwet

Predicting a label correctly does not necessarily require representing the operation that produces it. Transformer representations are known to carry label-level information, but whether they encode semantic operations producing those…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Nura Aljaafari , Marco Valentino , André Freitas

Large language models (LLMs) reliably predict neural activity during language comprehension and transformer depth has been interpreted as mirroring hierarchical cortical organization. However, it remains unclear whether such alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Ni Yang , Rui He , Philipp Homan , Iris Sommer , Davide Staub , Wolfram Hinzen