Eric W. Tramel

Aakshita Chandiramani, Aaron Blakeman, Abdullahi Olaoye et al. · amazon-science, cmu

We describe the pre-training, post-training, and quantization of Nemotron 3 Super, a 120 billion (active 12 billion) parameter hybrid Mamba-Attention Mixture-of-Experts model. Nemotron 3 Super is the first model in the Nemotron 3 family to 1) be pre-trained in NVFP4, 2) leverage LatentMoE, a new Mixture-of-Experts architecture that optimizes for both accuracy per FLOP and accuracy per parameter, and 3) include MTP layers for inference acceleration through native speculative decoding. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Super on 25 trillion tokens followed by post-training using supervised fine tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). The final model supports up to 1M context length and achieves comparable accuracy on common benchmarks, while also achieving up to 2.2x and 7.5x higher inference throughput compared to GPT-OSS-120B and Qwen3.5-122B, respectively. Nemotron 3 Super datasets, along with the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, are open-sourced on HuggingFace.

Nameyeh Alam, Jake Basilico, Daniele Bertolini et al.

A patient's digital twin is a computational model that describes the evolution of their health over time. Digital twins have the potential to revolutionize medicine by enabling individual-level computer simulations of human health, which can be used to conduct more efficient clinical trials or to recommend personalized treatment options. Due to the overwhelming complexity of human biology, machine learning approaches that leverage large datasets of historical patients' longitudinal health records to generate patients' digital twins are more tractable than potential mechanistic models. In this manuscript, we describe a neural network architecture that can learn conditional generative models of clinical trajectories, which we call Digital Twin Generators (DTGs), that can create digital twins of individual patients. We show that the same neural network architecture can be trained to generate accurate digital twins for patients across 13 different indications simply by changing the training set and tuning hyperparameters. By introducing a general purpose architecture, we aim to unlock the ability to scale machine learning approaches to larger datasets and across more indications so that a digital twin could be created for any patient in the world.

Enmao Diao, Eric W. Tramel, Jie Ding et al.

Keyword Spotting (KWS) is a critical aspect of audio-based applications on mobile devices and virtual assistants. Recent developments in Federated Learning (FL) have significantly expanded the ability to train machine learning models by utilizing the computational and private data resources of numerous distributed devices. However, existing FL methods typically require that devices possess accurate ground-truth labels, which can be both expensive and impractical when dealing with local audio data. In this study, we first demonstrate the effectiveness of Semi-Supervised Federated Learning (SSL) and FL for KWS. We then extend our investigation to Semi-Supervised Federated Learning (SSFL) for KWS, where devices possess completely unlabeled data, while the server has access to a small amount of labeled data. We perform numerical analyses using state-of-the-art SSL, FL, and SSFL techniques to demonstrate that the performance of KWS models can be significantly improved by leveraging the abundant unlabeled heterogeneous data available on devices.

Constance Beguier, Jean Ogier du Terrail, Iqraa Meah et al.

Since 2014, the NIH funded iDASH (integrating Data for Analysis, Anonymization, SHaring) National Center for Biomedical Computing has hosted yearly competitions on the topic of private computing for genomic data. For one track of the 2020 iteration of this competition, participants were challenged to produce an approach to federated learning (FL) training of genomic cancer prediction models using differential privacy (DP), with submissions ranked according to held-out test accuracy for a given set of DP budgets. More precisely, in this track, we are tasked with training a supervised model for the prediction of breast cancer occurrence from genomic data split between two virtual centers while ensuring data privacy with respect to model transfer via DP. In this article, we present our 3rd place submission to this competition. During the competition, we encountered two main challenges discussed in this article: i) ensuring correctness of the privacy budget evaluation and ii) achieving an acceptable trade-off between prediction performance and privacy budget.

Mathieu Andreux, Jean Ogier du Terrail, Constance Beguier et al.

While federated learning is a promising approach for training deep learning models over distributed sensitive datasets, it presents new challenges for machine learning, especially when applied in the medical domain where multi-centric data heterogeneity is common. Building on previous domain adaptation works, this paper proposes a novel federated learning approach for deep learning architectures via the introduction of local-statistic batch normalization (BN) layers, resulting in collaboratively-trained, yet center-specific models. This strategy improves robustness to data heterogeneity while also reducing the potential for information leaks by not sharing the center-specific layer activation statistics. We benchmark the proposed method on the classification of tumorous histopathology image patches extracted from the Camelyon16 and Camelyon17 datasets. We show that our approach compares favorably to previous state-of-the-art methods, especially for transfer learning across datasets.

Constance Beguier, Mathieu Andreux, Eric W. Tramel

Federated Learning enables one to jointly train a machine learning model across distributed clients holding sensitive datasets. In real-world settings, this approach is hindered by expensive communication and privacy concerns. Both of these challenges have already been addressed individually, resulting in competing optimisations. In this article, we tackle them simultaneously for one of the first times. More precisely, we adapt compression-based federated techniques to additive secret sharing, leading to an efficient secure aggregation protocol, with an adaptable security level. We prove its privacy against malicious adversaries and its correctness in the semi-honest setting. Experiments on deep convolutional networks demonstrate that our secure protocol achieves high accuracy with low communication costs. Compared to prior works on secure aggregation, our protocol has a lower communication and computation costs for a similar accuracy.

Gaspar Rochette, Andre Manoel, Eric W. Tramel

Deep learning frameworks leverage GPUs to perform massively-parallel computations over batches of many training examples efficiently. However, for certain tasks, one may be interested in performing per-example computations, for instance using per-example gradients to evaluate a quantity of interest unique to each example. One notable application comes from the field of differential privacy, where per-example gradients must be norm-bounded in order to limit the impact of each example on the aggregated batch gradient. In this work, we discuss how per-example gradients can be efficiently computed in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We compare existing strategies by performing a few steps of differentially-private training on CNNs of varying sizes. We also introduce a new strategy for per-example gradient calculation, which is shown to be advantageous depending on the model architecture and how the model is trained. This is a first step in making differentially-private training of CNNs practical.

Mikhail Zaslavskiy, Simon Jégou, Eric W. Tramel et al.

Timely assessment of compound toxicity is one of the biggest challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry today. A significant proportion of compounds identified as potential leads are ultimately discarded due to the toxicity they induce. In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning approach for the prediction of molecular activity on ToxCast targets. We combine extreme gradient boosting with fully-connected and graph-convolutional neural network architectures trained on QSAR physical molecular property descriptors, PubChem molecular fingerprints, and SMILES sequences. Our ensemble predictor leverages the strengths of each individual technique, significantly outperforming existing state-of-the art models on the ToxCast and Tox21 toxicity-prediction datasets. We provide free access to molecule toxicity prediction using our model at http://www.owkin.com/toxicblend.

Pierre Courtiol, Eric W. Tramel, Marc Sanselme et al.

Analysis of histopathology slides is a critical step for many diagnoses, and in particular in oncology where it defines the gold standard. In the case of digital histopathological analysis, highly trained pathologists must review vast whole-slide-images of extreme digital resolution ($100,000^2$ pixels) across multiple zoom levels in order to locate abnormal regions of cells, or in some cases single cells, out of millions. The application of deep learning to this problem is hampered not only by small sample sizes, as typical datasets contain only a few hundred samples, but also by the generation of ground-truth localized annotations for training interpretable classification and segmentation models. We propose a method for disease localization in the context of weakly supervised learning, where only image-level labels are available during training. Even without pixel-level annotations, we are able to demonstrate performance comparable with models trained with strong annotations on the Camelyon-16 lymph node metastases detection challenge. We accomplish this through the use of pre-trained deep convolutional networks, feature embedding, as well as learning via top instances and negative evidence, a multiple instance learning technique from the field of semantic segmentation and object detection.

Baptiste Goujaud, Eric W. Tramel, Pierre Courtiol et al.

Detection of interactions between treatment effects and patient descriptors in clinical trials is critical for optimizing the drug development process. The increasing volume of data accumulated in clinical trials provides a unique opportunity to discover new biomarkers and further the goal of personalized medicine, but it also requires innovative robust biomarker detection methods capable of detecting non-linear, and sometimes weak, signals. We propose a set of novel univariate statistical tests, based on the theory of random walks, which are able to capture non-linear and non-monotonic covariate-treatment interactions. We also propose a novel combined test, which leverages the power of all of our proposed univariate tests into a single general-case tool. We present results for both synthetic trials as well as real-world clinical trials, where we compare our method with state-of-the-art techniques and demonstrate the utility and robustness of our approach.

Andre Manoel, Florent Krzakala, Eric W. Tramel et al.

In statistical learning for real-world large-scale data problems, one must often resort to "streaming" algorithms which operate sequentially on small batches of data. In this work, we present an analysis of the information-theoretic limits of mini-batch inference in the context of generalized linear models and low-rank matrix factorization. In a controlled Bayes-optimal setting, we characterize the optimal performance and phase transitions as a function of mini-batch size. We base part of our results on a detailed analysis of a mini-batch version of the approximate message-passing algorithm (Mini-AMP), which we introduce. Additionally, we show that this theoretical optimality carries over into real-data problems by illustrating that Mini-AMP is competitive with standard streaming algorithms for clustering.

Eric W. Tramel, Marylou Gabrié, Andre Manoel et al.

Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) are energy-based neural-networks which are commonly used as the building blocks for deep architectures neural architectures. In this work, we derive a deterministic framework for the training, evaluation, and use of RBMs based upon the Thouless-Anderson-Palmer (TAP) mean-field approximation of widely-connected systems with weak interactions coming from spin-glass theory. While the TAP approach has been extensively studied for fully-visible binary spin systems, our construction is generalized to latent-variable models, as well as to arbitrarily distributed real-valued spin systems with bounded support. In our numerical experiments, we demonstrate the effective deterministic training of our proposed models and are able to show interesting features of unsupervised learning which could not be directly observed with sampling. Additionally, we demonstrate how to utilize our TAP-based framework for leveraging trained RBMs as joint priors in denoising problems.

Eric W. Tramel, Andre Manoel, Francesco Caltagirone et al.

In this work, we consider compressed sensing reconstruction from $M$ measurements of $K$-sparse structured signals which do not possess a writable correlation model. Assuming that a generative statistical model, such as a Boltzmann machine, can be trained in an unsupervised manner on example signals, we demonstrate how this signal model can be used within a Bayesian framework of signal reconstruction. By deriving a message-passing inference for general distribution restricted Boltzmann machines, we are able to integrate these inferred signal models into approximate message passing for compressed sensing reconstruction. Finally, we show for the MNIST dataset that this approach can be very effective, even for $M < K$.

Boshra Rajaei, Eric W. Tramel, Sylvain Gigan et al.

In this paper, the problem of compressive imaging is addressed using natural randomization by means of a multiply scattering medium. To utilize the medium in this way, its corresponding transmission matrix must be estimated. To calibrate the imager, we use a digital micromirror device (DMD) as a simple, cheap, and high-resolution binary intensity modulator. We propose a phase retrieval algorithm which is well adapted to intensity-only measurements on the camera, and to the input binary intensity patterns, both to estimate the complex transmission matrix as well as image reconstruction. We demonstrate promising experimental results for the proposed algorithm using the MNIST dataset of handwritten digits as example images.

Marylou Gabrié, Eric W. Tramel, Florent Krzakala

Restricted Boltzmann machines are undirected neural networks which have been shown to be effective in many applications, including serving as initializations for training deep multi-layer neural networks. One of the main reasons for their success is the existence of efficient and practical stochastic algorithms, such as contrastive divergence, for unsupervised training. We propose an alternative deterministic iterative procedure based on an improved mean field method from statistical physics known as the Thouless-Anderson-Palmer approach. We demonstrate that our algorithm provides performance equal to, and sometimes superior to, persistent contrastive divergence, while also providing a clear and easy to evaluate objective function. We believe that this strategy can be easily generalized to other models as well as to more accurate higher-order approximations, paving the way for systematic improvements in training Boltzmann machines with hidden units.

Eric W. Tramel, Angélique Drémeau, Florent Krzakala

Approximate Message Passing (AMP) has been shown to be an excellent statistical approach to signal inference and compressed sensing problem. The AMP framework provides modularity in the choice of signal prior; here we propose a hierarchical form of the Gauss-Bernouilli prior which utilizes a Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) trained on the signal support to push reconstruction performance beyond that of simple iid priors for signals whose support can be well represented by a trained binary RBM. We present and analyze two methods of RBM factorization and demonstrate how these affect signal reconstruction performance within our proposed algorithm. Finally, using the MNIST handwritten digit dataset, we show experimentally that using an RBM allows AMP to approach oracle-support performance.

Eric W. Tramel, Santhosh Kumar, Andrei Giurgiu et al.

These notes review six lectures given by Prof. Andrea Montanari on the topic of statistical estimation for linear models. The first two lectures cover the principles of signal recovery from linear measurements in terms of minimax risk. Subsequent lectures demonstrate the application of these principles to several practical problems in science and engineering. Specifically, these topics include denoising of error-laden signals, recovery of compressively sensed signals, reconstruction of low-rank matrices, and also the discovery of hidden cliques within large networks.

Andre Manoel, Florent Krzakala, Eric W. Tramel et al.

Approximate Message Passing (AMP) has been shown to be a superior method for inference problems, such as the recovery of signals from sets of noisy, lower-dimensionality measurements, both in terms of reconstruction accuracy and in computational efficiency. However, AMP suffers from serious convergence issues in contexts that do not exactly match its assumptions. We propose a new approach to stabilizing AMP in these contexts by applying AMP updates to individual coefficients rather than in parallel. Our results show that this change to the AMP iteration can provide theoretically expected, but hitherto unobtainable, performance for problems on which the standard AMP iteration diverges. Additionally, we find that the computational costs of this swept coefficient update scheme is not unduly burdensome, allowing it to be applied efficiently to signals of large dimensionality.