Nilesh Tripuraneni

Kiran Vodrahalli, Santiago Ontanon, Nilesh Tripuraneni et al. · deepmind

We introduce Michelangelo: a minimal, synthetic, and unleaked long-context reasoning evaluation for large language models which is also easy to automatically score. This evaluation is derived via a novel, unifying framework for evaluations over arbitrarily long contexts which measure the model's ability to do more than retrieve a single piece of information from its context. The central idea of the Latent Structure Queries framework (LSQ) is to construct tasks which require a model to ``chisel away'' the irrelevant information in the context, revealing a latent structure in the context. To verify a model's understanding of this latent structure, we query the model for details of the structure. Using LSQ, we produce three diagnostic long-context evaluations across code and natural-language domains intended to provide a stronger signal of long-context language model capabilities. We perform evaluations on several state-of-the-art models and demonstrate both that a) the proposed evaluations are high-signal and b) that there is significant room for improvement in synthesizing long-context information.

Steve Yadlowsky, Lyric Doshi, Nilesh Tripuraneni

Transformer models, notably large language models (LLMs), have the remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) -- to perform new tasks when prompted with unseen input-output examples without any explicit model training. In this work, we study how effectively transformers can bridge between their pretraining data mixture, comprised of multiple distinct task families, to identify and learn new tasks in-context which are both inside and outside the pretraining distribution. Building on previous work, we investigate this question in a controlled setting, where we study transformer models trained on sequences of $(x, f(x))$ pairs rather than natural language. Our empirical results show transformers demonstrate near-optimal unsupervised model selection capabilities, in their ability to first in-context identify different task families and in-context learn within them when the task families are well-represented in their pretraining data. However when presented with tasks or functions which are out-of-domain of their pretraining data, we demonstrate various failure modes of transformers and degradation of their generalization for even simple extrapolation tasks. Together our results highlight that the impressive ICL abilities of high-capacity sequence models may be more closely tied to the coverage of their pretraining data mixtures than inductive biases that create fundamental generalization capabilities.

Nilesh Tripuraneni, Lee Richardson, Alexander D'Amour et al.

In many randomized experiments, the treatment effect of the long-term metric (i.e. the primary outcome of interest) is often difficult or infeasible to measure. Such long-term metrics are often slow to react to changes and sufficiently noisy they are challenging to faithfully estimate in short-horizon experiments. A common alternative is to measure several short-term proxy metrics in the hope they closely track the long-term metric -- so they can be used to effectively guide decision-making in the near-term. We introduce a new statistical framework to both define and construct an optimal proxy metric for use in a homogeneous population of randomized experiments. Our procedure first reduces the construction of an optimal proxy metric in a given experiment to a portfolio optimization problem which depends on the true latent treatment effects and noise level of experiment under consideration. We then denoise the observed treatment effects of the long-term metric and a set of proxies in a historical corpus of randomized experiments to extract estimates of the latent treatment effects for use in the optimization problem. One key insight derived from our approach is that the optimal proxy metric for a given experiment is not apriori fixed; rather it should depend on the sample size (or effective noise level) of the randomized experiment for which it is deployed. To instantiate and evaluate our framework, we employ our methodology in a large corpus of randomized experiments from an industrial recommendation system and construct proxy metrics that perform favorably relative to several baselines.

Gemini Team, Petko Georgiev, Ving Ian Lei et al. · deepmind, mila

In this report, we introduce the Gemini 1.5 family of models, representing the next generation of highly compute-efficient multimodal models capable of recalling and reasoning over fine-grained information from millions of tokens of context, including multiple long documents and hours of video and audio. The family includes two new models: (1) an updated Gemini 1.5 Pro, which exceeds the February version on the great majority of capabilities and benchmarks; (2) Gemini 1.5 Flash, a more lightweight variant designed for efficiency with minimal regression in quality. Gemini 1.5 models achieve near-perfect recall on long-context retrieval tasks across modalities, improve the state-of-the-art in long-document QA, long-video QA and long-context ASR, and match or surpass Gemini 1.0 Ultra's state-of-the-art performance across a broad set of benchmarks. Studying the limits of Gemini 1.5's long-context ability, we find continued improvement in next-token prediction and near-perfect retrieval (>99%) up to at least 10M tokens, a generational leap over existing models such as Claude 3.0 (200k) and GPT-4 Turbo (128k). Finally, we highlight real-world use cases, such as Gemini 1.5 collaborating with professionals on completing their tasks achieving 26 to 75% time savings across 10 different job categories, as well as surprising new capabilities of large language models at the frontier; when given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content.

Gheorghe Comanici, Eric Bieber, Mike Schaekermann et al. · amazon-science, baidu

In this report, we introduce the Gemini 2.X model family: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as our earlier Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite models. Gemini 2.5 Pro is our most capable model yet, achieving SoTA performance on frontier coding and reasoning benchmarks. In addition to its incredible coding and reasoning skills, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a thinking model that excels at multimodal understanding and it is now able to process up to 3 hours of video content. Its unique combination of long context, multimodal and reasoning capabilities can be combined to unlock new agentic workflows. Gemini 2.5 Flash provides excellent reasoning abilities at a fraction of the compute and latency requirements and Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite provide high performance at low latency and cost. Taken together, the Gemini 2.X model generation spans the full Pareto frontier of model capability vs cost, allowing users to explore the boundaries of what is possible with complex agentic problem solving.

Gemini Team, Rohan Anil, Sebastian Borgeaud et al.

This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of the Gemini family in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases. We discuss our approach toward post-training and deploying Gemini models responsibly to users through services including Gemini, Gemini Advanced, Google AI Studio, and Cloud Vertex AI.

Nilesh Tripuraneni, Dhruv Madeka, Dean Foster et al.

A central obstacle in the objective assessment of treatment effect (TE) estimators in randomized control trials (RCTs) is the lack of ground truth (or validation set) to test their performance. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-validation-like methodology to address this challenge. The key insight of our procedure is that the noisy (but unbiased) difference-of-means estimate can be used as a ground truth ``label" on a portion of the RCT, to test the performance of an estimator trained on the other portion. We combine this insight with an aggregation scheme, which borrows statistical strength across a large collection of RCTs, to present an end-to-end methodology for judging an estimator's ability to recover the underlying treatment effect as well as produce an optimal treatment "roll out" policy. We evaluate our methodology across 699 RCTs implemented in the Amazon supply chain. In this heavy-tailed setting, our methodology suggests that procedures that aggressively downweight or truncate large values, while introducing bias, lower the variance enough to ensure that the treatment effect is more accurately estimated.

Nilesh Tripuraneni, Ben Adlam, Jeffrey Pennington

A significant obstacle in the development of robust machine learning models is covariate shift, a form of distribution shift that occurs when the input distributions of the training and test sets differ while the conditional label distributions remain the same. Despite the prevalence of covariate shift in real-world applications, a theoretical understanding in the context of modern machine learning has remained lacking. In this work, we examine the exact high-dimensional asymptotics of random feature regression under covariate shift and present a precise characterization of the limiting test error, bias, and variance in this setting. Our results motivate a natural partial order over covariate shifts that provides a sufficient condition for determining when the shift will harm (or even help) test performance. We find that overparameterized models exhibit enhanced robustness to covariate shift, providing one of the first theoretical explanations for this intriguing phenomenon. Additionally, our analysis reveals an exact linear relationship between in-distribution and out-of-distribution generalization performance, offering an explanation for this surprising recent empirical observation.

Jeffrey Chan, Aldo Pacchiano, Nilesh Tripuraneni et al.

Standard approaches to decision-making under uncertainty focus on sequential exploration of the space of decisions. However, \textit{simultaneously} proposing a batch of decisions, which leverages available resources for parallel experimentation, has the potential to rapidly accelerate exploration. We present a family of (parallel) contextual bandit algorithms applicable to problems with bounded eluder dimension whose regret is nearly identical to their perfectly sequential counterparts -- given access to the same total number of oracle queries -- up to a lower-order ``burn-in" term. We further show these algorithms can be specialized to the class of linear reward functions where we introduce and analyze several new linear bandit algorithms which explicitly introduce diversity into their action selection. Finally, we also present an empirical evaluation of these parallel algorithms in several domains, including materials discovery and biological sequence design problems, to demonstrate the utility of parallelized bandits in practical settings.

Yeshwanth Cherapanamjeri, Nilesh Tripuraneni, Peter L. Bartlett et al.

We study the problem of heavy-tailed mean estimation in settings where the variance of the data-generating distribution does not exist. Concretely, given a sample $\mathbf{X} = \{X_i\}_{i = 1}^n$ from a distribution $\mathcal{D}$ over $\mathbb{R}^d$ with mean $μ$ which satisfies the following \emph{weak-moment} assumption for some ${α\in [0, 1]}$: \begin{equation*} \forall \|v\| = 1: \mathbb{E}_{X \thicksim \mathcal{D}}[\lvert \langle X - μ, v\rangle \rvert^{1 + α}] \leq 1, \end{equation*} and given a target failure probability, $δ$, our goal is to design an estimator which attains the smallest possible confidence interval as a function of $n,d,δ$. For the specific case of $α= 1$, foundational work of Lugosi and Mendelson exhibits an estimator achieving subgaussian confidence intervals, and subsequent work has led to computationally efficient versions of this estimator. Here, we study the case of general $α$, and establish the following information-theoretic lower bound on the optimal attainable confidence interval: \begin{equation*} Ω\left(\sqrt{\frac{d}{n}} + \left(\frac{d}{n}\right)^{\fracα{(1 + α)}} + \left(\frac{\log 1 / δ}{n}\right)^{\fracα{(1 + α)}}\right). \end{equation*} Moreover, we devise a computationally-efficient estimator which achieves this lower bound.

Yeshwanth Cherapanamjeri, Efe Aras, Nilesh Tripuraneni et al.

We study the problem of high-dimensional robust linear regression where a learner is given access to $n$ samples from the generative model $Y = \langle X,w^* \rangle + ε$ (with $X \in \mathbb{R}^d$ and $ε$ independent), in which an $η$ fraction of the samples have been adversarially corrupted. We propose estimators for this problem under two settings: (i) $X$ is L4-L2 hypercontractive, $\mathbb{E} [XX^\top]$ has bounded condition number and $ε$ has bounded variance and (ii) $X$ is sub-Gaussian with identity second moment and $ε$ is sub-Gaussian. In both settings, our estimators: (a) Achieve optimal sample complexities and recovery guarantees up to log factors and (b) Run in near linear time ($\tilde{O}(nd / η^6)$). Prior to our work, polynomial time algorithms achieving near optimal sample complexities were only known in the setting where $X$ is Gaussian with identity covariance and $ε$ is Gaussian, and no linear time estimators were known for robust linear regression in any setting. Our estimators and their analysis leverage recent developments in the construction of faster algorithms for robust mean estimation to improve runtimes, and refined concentration of measure arguments alongside Gaussian rounding techniques to improve statistical sample complexities.

Nilesh Tripuraneni, Michael I. Jordan, Chi Jin

We provide new statistical guarantees for transfer learning via representation learning--when transfer is achieved by learning a feature representation shared across different tasks. This enables learning on new tasks using far less data than is required to learn them in isolation. Formally, we consider $t+1$ tasks parameterized by functions of the form $f_j \circ h$ in a general function class $\mathcal{F} \circ \mathcal{H}$, where each $f_j$ is a task-specific function in $\mathcal{F}$ and $h$ is the shared representation in $\mathcal{H}$. Letting $C(\cdot)$ denote the complexity measure of the function class, we show that for diverse training tasks (1) the sample complexity needed to learn the shared representation across the first $t$ training tasks scales as $C(\mathcal{H}) + t C(\mathcal{F})$, despite no explicit access to a signal from the feature representation and (2) with an accurate estimate of the representation, the sample complexity needed to learn a new task scales only with $C(\mathcal{F})$. Our results depend upon a new general notion of task diversity--applicable to models with general tasks, features, and losses--as well as a novel chain rule for Gaussian complexities. Finally, we exhibit the utility of our general framework in several models of importance in the literature.

Nilesh Tripuraneni, Chi Jin, Michael I. Jordan

Meta-learning, or learning-to-learn, seeks to design algorithms that can utilize previous experience to rapidly learn new skills or adapt to new environments. Representation learning -- a key tool for performing meta-learning -- learns a data representation that can transfer knowledge across multiple tasks, which is essential in regimes where data is scarce. Despite a recent surge of interest in the practice of meta-learning, the theoretical underpinnings of meta-learning algorithms are lacking, especially in the context of learning transferable representations. In this paper, we focus on the problem of multi-task linear regression -- in which multiple linear regression models share a common, low-dimensional linear representation. Here, we provide provably fast, sample-efficient algorithms to address the dual challenges of (1) learning a common set of features from multiple, related tasks, and (2) transferring this knowledge to new, unseen tasks. Both are central to the general problem of meta-learning. Finally, we complement these results by providing information-theoretic lower bounds on the sample complexity of learning these linear features.

Nilesh Tripuraneni, Lester Mackey

Standard methods in supervised learning separate training and prediction: the model is fit independently of any test points it may encounter. However, can knowledge of the next test point $\mathbf{x}_{\star}$ be exploited to improve prediction accuracy? We address this question in the context of linear prediction, showing how techniques from semi-parametric inference can be used transductively to combat regularization bias. We first lower bound the $\mathbf{x}_{\star}$ prediction error of ridge regression and the Lasso, showing that they must incur significant bias in certain test directions. We then provide non-asymptotic upper bounds on the $\mathbf{x}_{\star}$ prediction error of two transductive prediction rules. We conclude by showing the efficacy of our methods on both synthetic and real data, highlighting the improvements single point transductive prediction can provide in settings with distribution shift.

Runjing Liu, Jeffrey Regier, Nilesh Tripuraneni et al.

We wish to compute the gradient of an expectation over a finite or countably infinite sample space having $K \leq \infty$ categories. When $K$ is indeed infinite, or finite but very large, the relevant summation is intractable. Accordingly, various stochastic gradient estimators have been proposed. In this paper, we describe a technique that can be applied to reduce the variance of any such estimator, without changing its bias---in particular, unbiasedness is retained. We show that our technique is an instance of Rao-Blackwellization, and we demonstrate the improvement it yields on a semi-supervised classification problem and a pixel attention task.

Nilesh Tripuraneni, Nicolas Flammarion, Francis Bach et al.

We consider the minimization of a function defined on a Riemannian manifold $\mathcal{M}$ accessible only through unbiased estimates of its gradients. We develop a geometric framework to transform a sequence of slowly converging iterates generated from stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on $\mathcal{M}$ to an averaged iterate sequence with a robust and fast $O(1/n)$ convergence rate. We then present an application of our framework to geodesically-strongly-convex (and possibly Euclidean non-convex) problems. Finally, we demonstrate how these ideas apply to the case of streaming $k$-PCA, where we show how to accelerate the slow rate of the randomized power method (without requiring knowledge of the eigengap) into a robust algorithm achieving the optimal rate of convergence.

Nilesh Tripuraneni, Mitchell Stern, Chi Jin et al.

This paper proposes a stochastic variant of a classic algorithm---the cubic-regularized Newton method [Nesterov and Polyak 2006]. The proposed algorithm efficiently escapes saddle points and finds approximate local minima for general smooth, nonconvex functions in only $\mathcal{\tilde{O}}(ε^{-3.5})$ stochastic gradient and stochastic Hessian-vector product evaluations. The latter can be computed as efficiently as stochastic gradients. This improves upon the $\mathcal{\tilde{O}}(ε^{-4})$ rate of stochastic gradient descent. Our rate matches the best-known result for finding local minima without requiring any delicate acceleration or variance-reduction techniques.

Matej Balog, Nilesh Tripuraneni, Zoubin Ghahramani et al.

The Gumbel trick is a method to sample from a discrete probability distribution, or to estimate its normalizing partition function. The method relies on repeatedly applying a random perturbation to the distribution in a particular way, each time solving for the most likely configuration. We derive an entire family of related methods, of which the Gumbel trick is one member, and show that the new methods have superior properties in several settings with minimal additional computational cost. In particular, for the Gumbel trick to yield computational benefits for discrete graphical models, Gumbel perturbations on all configurations are typically replaced with so-called low-rank perturbations. We show how a subfamily of our new methods adapts to this setting, proving new upper and lower bounds on the log partition function and deriving a family of sequential samplers for the Gibbs distribution. Finally, we balance the discussion by showing how the simpler analytical form of the Gumbel trick enables additional theoretical results.

Nilesh Tripuraneni, Mark Rowland, Zoubin Ghahramani et al.

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) exploits Hamiltonian dynamics to construct efficient proposals for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). In this paper, we present a generalization of HMC which exploits \textit{non-canonical} Hamiltonian dynamics. We refer to this algorithm as magnetic HMC, since in 3 dimensions a subset of the dynamics map onto the mechanics of a charged particle coupled to a magnetic field. We establish a theoretical basis for the use of non-canonical Hamiltonian dynamics in MCMC, and construct a symplectic, leapfrog-like integrator allowing for the implementation of magnetic HMC. Finally, we exhibit several examples where these non-canonical dynamics can lead to improved mixing of magnetic HMC relative to ordinary HMC.

Nilesh Tripuraneni, Shane Gu, Hong Ge et al.

Infinite Hidden Markov Models (iHMM's) are an attractive, nonparametric generalization of the classical Hidden Markov Model which can automatically infer the number of hidden states in the system. However, due to the infinite-dimensional nature of transition dynamics performing inference in the iHMM is difficult. In this paper, we present an infinite-state Particle Gibbs (PG) algorithm to resample state trajectories for the iHMM. The proposed algorithm uses an efficient proposal optimized for iHMMs and leverages ancestor sampling to suppress degeneracy of the standard PG algorithm. Our algorithm demonstrates significant convergence improvements on synthetic and real world data sets. Additionally, the infinite-state PG algorithm has linear-time complexity in the number of states in the sampler, while competing methods scale quadratically.