Class Type: Spring 2026
SILO: Bayesian Optimization Beyond the Black Box: Leveraging Computational Structure for Efficient and Scalable Decision-Making
Abstract Bayesian optimization (BO) is a principled framework for optimizing expensive, noisy objective functions, but traditional BO treats the system as a black box and learns only through input-output queries. In many scientific and engineering settings, this assumption is unnecessarily restrictive; valuable computational structure is often available, even if the …
SILO: How to Use Synthetic Data for Improved Statistical Inference?
Abstract The rapid proliferation of high-quality synthetic data — generated by advanced AI models or collected as auxiliary data from related tasks — presents both opportunities and challenges for statistical inference. Here, we introduce the GEneral Synthetic-Powered Inference (GESPI) framework that wraps around any statistical inference procedure to safely enhance …
SILO: High-dimensional Optimization with Applications to Compute-Optimal Neural Scaling Laws
Abstract Given the massive scale of modern ML models, we now only get a single shot to train them effectively. This restricts our ability to test multiple architectures and hyper-parameter configurations. Instead, we need to understand how these models scale, allowing us to experiment with smaller problems and then apply …
SILO: Theory and practice of LLM quantization
Abstract Modern LLMs process information by repeatedly applying a basic primitive of matrix multiplication. Estimates show that about 60-84% of the energy consumed by LLMs goes into memory load/store operations. How can we reduce this power consumption? LLM converts text into a sequence of tokens (which can be thought as …