Patrick Haluptzok

Patrick Haluptzok, Matthew Bowers, Adam Tauman Kalai

Recent Language Models (LMs) achieve breakthrough performance in code generation when trained on human-authored problems, even solving some competitive-programming problems. Self-play has proven useful in games such as Go, and thus it is natural to ask whether LMs can generate their own instructive programming problems to improve their performance. We show that it is possible for an LM to synthesize programming problems and solutions, which are filtered for correctness by a Python interpreter. The LM's performance is then seen to improve when it is fine-tuned on its own synthetic problems and verified solutions; thus the model 'improves itself' using the Python interpreter. Problems are specified formally as programming puzzles [Schuster et al., 2021], a code-based problem format where solutions can easily be verified for correctness by execution. In experiments on publicly-available LMs, test accuracy more than doubles. This work demonstrates the potential for code LMs, with an interpreter, to generate instructive problems and improve their own performance.

Mikhail Parakhin, André M. Carvalho, Patrick Haluptzok

We present the Wristband Gaussian Loss, a deterministic batch loss for Gaussianizing point embeddings without sampling, KL terms, or iterative transport. Each $x \in \mathbb{R}^d$ is mapped to a direction $u = x/\|x\|$ and a CDF-transformed radius $t = F_{χ^2_d}(\|x\|^2)$ on the wristband $S^{d-1} \times [0,1]$. We prove (and machine-verify in Lean~4) that for $d \ge 2$ the pushforward wristband map equals $σ_{d-1} \otimes \mathrm{Unif}[0,1]$ iff the source is $\mathcal{N}(0, I_d)$, and that the Neumann-reflected wristband repulsion energy is uniquely minimized at the uniform target. We compute this reflected-kernel objective in two ways: a nearest three-image pairwise truncation at $O(N^2 d)$, and a spectral Neumann path joining angular and radial Mercer modes (spherical-harmonic and cosine) at $O(N d K)$, with empirically matched gradients. A 1D Wasserstein radial term and a moment penalty serve as finite-sample accelerators with the same optimum, and Monte-Carlo null calibration turns the components into a single standardized statistic. We evaluate direct point-cloud Gaussianization with a calibrated barycentric $W_2$ score: a deterministic Gaussian reference batch is built by recursive Hungarian averaging, with each method reported as a $z$-score against same-size Gaussian batches. On the axis-uniform X benchmark, Wristband is competitive in 2D and gives the best 10D score. On a harder radial--angular-copula impostor whose Gaussian radial and angular marginals are correct but dependent, Wristband gives the best 10D and 128D scores. Coupled with learnable-key Euclidean attention and exact invertible flows, the resulting Deterministic Gaussian Autoencoder delivers a Gaussian-latent interface for counterfactual sampling with independent factors and a context/residual construction for dependent factors.