Publications related to Principled Parallel Mean-Field Inference for Discrete Random Fields

Understanding generalization and robustness in modern deep learning

In this thesis, we study two closely related directions: robustness and generalization in modern deep learning. Deep learning models based on empirical risk minimization are known to be often non-robust to small, worst-case perturbations known as adversari ...

EPFL2024

Statistical Inference for Inverse Problems: From Sparsity-Based Methods to Neural Networks

Pakshal Narendra Bohra

In inverse problems, the task is to reconstruct an unknown signal from its possibly noise-corrupted measurements. Penalized-likelihood-based estimation and Bayesian estimation are two powerful statistical paradigms for the resolution of such problems. They ...

EPFL2024

Optimization Algorithms for Decentralized, Distributed and Collaborative Machine Learning

Anastasiia Koloskova

Distributed learning is the key for enabling training of modern large-scale machine learning models, through parallelising the learning process. Collaborative learning is essential for learning from privacy-sensitive data that is distributed across various ...

EPFL2024

Distribution Inference Risks: Identifying and Mitigating Sources of Leakage

Léo Nicolas René Meynent, Maxime Jean Julien Peyrard, Robert West, Valentin Hartmann

A large body of work shows that machine learning (ML) models can leak sensitive or confidential information about their training data. Recently, leakage due to distribution inference (or property inference) attacks is gaining attention. In this attack, the ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2023

Stochastic adaptive resampling for the estimation of discrete choice models

Michel Bierlaire, Nicola Marco Ortelli, Matthieu Marie Cochon de Lapparent

In the field of choice modeling, the availability of ever-larger datasets has the potential to significantly expand our understanding of human behavior, but this prospect is limited by the poor scalability of discrete choice models (DCMs): as sample sizes ...

2023

Higher Order Asymptotics: Applications to Satellite Conjunction and Boundary Problems

Soumaya Elkantassi

Higher-order asymptotics provide accurate approximations for use in parametric statistical modelling. In this thesis, we investigate using higher-order approximations in two-specific settings, with a particular emphasis on the tangent exponential model. ...

EPFL2023

Wind, Hail, and Climate Extremes: Modelling and Attribution Studies for Environmental Data

Ophélia Mireille Anna Miralles

This thesis presents work at the junction of statistics and climate science. We first provide methodology for use by climate scientists when performing fast event attribution using extreme value theory, and then describe two interdisciplinary projects in c ...

EPFL2023

Fundamental Limits in Statistical Learning Problems: Block Models and Neural Networks

Elisabetta Cornacchia

This thesis focuses on two selected learning problems: 1) statistical inference on graphs models, and, 2) gradient descent on neural networks, with the common objective of defining and analysing the measures that characterize the fundamental limits. In th ...

EPFL2023

Impact of Redundancy on Resilience in Distributed Optimization and Learning

Shuo Liu, Nirupam Gupta

This paper considers the problem of resilient distributed optimization and stochastic learning in a server-based architecture. The system comprises a server and multiple agents, where each agent has its own local cost function. The agents collaborate with ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023

Universal and adaptive methods for robust stochastic optimization

Ali Kavis

Within the context of contemporary machine learning problems, efficiency of optimization process depends on the properties of the model and the nature of the data available, which poses a significant problem as the complexity of either increases ad infinit ...

EPFL2023

The statistical complexity of early-stopped mirror descent

Varun Kanade, Tomas Vaskevicius

Recently there has been a surge of interest in understanding implicit regularization properties of iterative gradient-based optimization algorithms. In this paper, we study the statistical guarantees on the excess risk achieved by early-stopped unconstrain ...

Oxford Univ Press2023

Regularization Techniques for Low-Resource Machine Translation

Alejandro Ramírez Atrio

Neural machine translation (MT) and text generation have recently reached very high levels of quality. However, both areas share a problem: in order to reach these levels, they require massive amounts of data. When this is not present, they lack generaliza ...

EPFL2023

DARE: Towards Robust Text Explanations in Biomedical and Healthcare Applications

Pascal Frossard, Ádám Dániel Ivánkay

Along with the successful deployment of deep neural networks in several application domains, the need to unravel the black-box nature of these networks has seen a significant increase recently. Several methods have been introduced to provide insight into t ...

Assoc Computational Linguistics-Acl2023

Positive Definite Completions and Continuous Graphical Models

Kartik Waghmare

This thesis concerns the theory of positive-definite completions and its mutually beneficial connections to the statistics of function-valued or continuously-indexed random processes, better known as functional data analysis. In particular, it dwells upon ...

EPFL2023

Byzantine-Resilient Learning Beyond Gradients: Distributing Evolutionary Search

Rachid Guerraoui, Andrei Kucharavy, Matteo Monti

Modern machine learning (ML) models are capable of impressive performances. However, their prowess is not due only to the improvements in their architecture and training algorithms but also to a drastic increase in computational power used to train them.|S ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023

Space Oddity? A Statistical Formulation of Conjunction Assessment

Anthony Christopher Davison, Soumaya Elkantassi

Satellite conjunctions involving "near misses" of space objects are becoming increasingly likely. One approach to risk analysis for them involves the computation of the collision probability, but this has been regarded as having some counterintuitive prope ...

AMER INST AERONAUTICS ASTRONAUTICS2022

Multi-Level Monte Carlo Methods for Uncertainty Quantification and Risk-Averse Optimisation

Sundar Subramaniam Ganesh

This work aims to study the effects of wind uncertainties in civil engineering structural design. Optimising the design of a structure for safety or operability without factoring in these uncertainties can result in a design that is not robust to these per ...

EPFL2022

Generalization and Personalization of Mobile Sensing-Based Mood Inference Models: An Analysis of College Students in Eight Countries

Daniel Gatica-Perez, Lakmal Buddika Meegahapola

Mood inference with mobile sensing data has been studied in ubicomp literature over the last decade. This inference enables context-aware and personalized user experiences in general mobile apps and valuable feedback and interventions in mobile health apps ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2022

Gradient-Based Learning of Discrete Structured Measurement Operators for Signal Recovery

Jonathan Paul Sauder

Countless signal processing applications include the reconstruction of signals from few indirect linear measurements. The design of effective measurement operators is typically constrained by the underlying hardware and physics, posing a challenging and of ...

2022

Iterative pre-conditioning for expediting the distributed gradient-descent method: The case of linear least-squares problem

Nirupam Gupta

This paper considers the multi-agent linear least-squares problem in a server-agent network architecture. The system comprises multiple agents, each with a set of local data points. The agents are connected to a server, and there is no inter-agent communic ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2022