VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Christian Walder
dblp:35/317
· DBLP profile ↗
21ranked-venue papers
8as first author
12since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 18 · 7 first-author · 10 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 5 · 1 first-author · 3 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 3 · 3 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 3D-Prover: Diversity Driven Theorem Proving With Determinantal Point ProcessesabstractA key challenge in automated formal reasoning is the intractable search space, which grows exponentially with the depth of the proof. This branching is caused by the large number of candidate proof tactics which can be applied to a given goal. Nonetheless, many of these tactics are semantically similar or lead to an execution error, wasting valuable resources in both cases. We address the problem of effectively pruning this search, using only synthetic data generated from previous proof attempts. We first demonstrate that it is possible to generate semantically aware tactic representations which capture the effect on the proving environment, likelihood of success, and execution time. We then propose a novel filtering mechanism which leverages these representations to select semantically diverse and high quality tactics, using Determinantal Point Processes. Our approach, 3D-Prover, is designed to be general, and to augment any underlying tactic generator. We demonstrate the effectiveness of 3D-Prover on the miniF2F and LeanDojo benchmarks by augmenting popular open source proving LLMs. We show that our approach leads to an increase in the overall proof rate, as well as a significant improvement in the tactic success
rate, execution time and diversity. We make our code available at https://github.com/sean-lamont/3D-Prover. Sean Lamont, Christian Walder, Amir Dezfouli, Paul Montague, Michael Norrish |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2025 | Pass@K Policy Optimization: Solving Harder Reinforcement Learning ProblemsabstractReinforcement Learning algorithms commonly sample multiple ($n>1$) solution attempts for each problem and reward them independently. This optimizes for pass@1 performance and prioritizes individual sample performance over the diversity and collective utility of a set of samples. Such algorithms under-utilize the sampling capacity, limiting exploration and eventual improvement on harder examples. As a fix, we propose Pass-at-$k$ Policy Optimization (PKPO), a multivariate transformation on batches of rewards which leads to direct optimization of \passk\ performance, thus optimizing for sets of samples that feature a large maximum reward when considered jointly. Our primary contribution is to derive novel low variance unbiased estimators for the pass@k and its gradient, in both the binary and continuous reward settings. We show that optimizing with these estimators reduces to reinforcement learning with (batches of) rewards that have been jointly transformed by a function that is stable and efficient to compute.
While previous efforts propose transformations for $k=n$, our transformations are the first to enable robust optimization of the pass@k for any arbitrary $k \leq n$. Rather than simply trading off pass@1 performance for pass@k gains, our method allows annealing $k$ during training, optimizing both metrics and often achieving strong pass@1 performance alongside significant pass@k gains.
We validate our transformations on illustrative toy experiments, which reveal the variance reducing properties of our formulations. We also include real-world examples using the open-source models Gemma and Llama . We find that our transformation effectively optimizes for the target $k$. Furthermore, higher $k$ values enable solving more and harder problems, while annealing $k$ boosts both the pass@1 and pass@k. Crucially, for challenging task sets where conventional pass@1 optimization stalls, our pass@k approach unblocks learning, likely by improving exploration through the prioritization of joint utility over the utility of individual samples Christian Walder, Deep Karkhanis |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2024 | BAIT: Benchmarking (Embedding) Architectures for Interactive Theorem-ProvingabstractArtificial Intelligence for Theorem Proving (AITP) has given rise to a plethora of benchmarks and methodologies, particularly in Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP). Research in the area is fragmented, with a diverse set of approaches being spread across several ITP systems. This presents a significant challenge to the comparison of methods, which are often complex and difficult to replicate. Addressing this, we present BAIT, a framework for the fair and streamlined comparison of learning approaches in ITP. We demonstrate BAIT’s capabilities with an in-depth comparison, across several ITP benchmarks, of state-of-the-art architectures applied to the problem of formula embedding. We find that Structure Aware Transformers perform particularly well, improving on techniques associated with the original problem sets. BAIT also allows us to assess the end-to-end proving performance of systems built on interactive environments. This unified perspective reveals a novel end-to-end system that improves on prior work. We also provide a qualitative analysis, illustrating that improved performance is associated with more semantically-aware embeddings. By streamlining the implementation and comparison of Machine Learning algorithms in the ITP context, we anticipate BAIT will be a springboard for future research. Sean Lamont, Michael Norrish, Amir Dezfouli, Christian Walder, Paul Montague |
AAAI | 4 |
| 2024 | A Universal Sets-level Optimization Framework for Next Set RecommendationabstractNext Set Recommendation (NSRec), encompassing related tasks such as next basket recommendation and temporal sets prediction, stands as a trending research topic. Although numerous attempts have been made on this topic, there are certain drawbacks: (i) Existing studies are still confined to utilizing objective functions commonly found in Next Item Recommendation (NIRec), such as binary cross entropy and BPR, which are calculated based on individual item comparisons; (ii) They place emphasis on building sophisticated learning models to capture intricate dependency relationships across sequential sets, but frequently overlook pivotal dependency in their objective functions; (iii) Diversity factor within sequential sets is frequently overlooked. In this research, we endeavor to unveil a universal and Sets-level optimization framework for Next Set Recommendation (SNSRec), offering a holistic fusion of diversity distribution and intricate dependency relationships within temporal sets. To realize this, the following contributions are made: (i) We directly model the temporal set in a sequence as a cohesive entity, leveraging the Structured Determinantal Point Process (SDPP), wherein the probabilistic DPP distribution prioritizes collections of structures (sequential sets) instead of individual items; (ii) We introduce a co-occurrence representation to discern and acknowledge the importance of different sets; (iii) We propose a sets-level optimization criterion, which integrates the diversity distribution and dependency relations across the entire sequence of sets, guiding the model to recommend relevant and diversified set. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that our approach consistently outperforms previous methods on both relevance and diversity. Yuli Liu, Min Liu 0022, Christian Walder, Lexing Xie |
CIKM | 3 |
| 2024 | SoundLoCD: An Efficient Conditional Discrete Contrastive Latent Diffusion Model for Text-to-Sound GenerationabstractWe present SoundLoCD, a novel text-to-sound generation framework, which incorporates a LoRA-based conditional discrete contrastive latent diffusion model. Unlike recent large-scale sound generation models, our model can be efficiently trained under limited computational resources. The integration of a contrastive learning strategy further enhances the connection between text conditions and the generated outputs, resulting in coherent and high-fidelity performance. Our experiments demonstrate that SoundLoCD outperforms the baseline with greatly reduced computational resources. A comprehensive ablation study further validates the contribution of each component within SoundLoCD1. Xinlei Niu, Jing Zhang 0052, Christian Walder, Charles P. Martin |
ICASSP | 3 |
| 2024 | Learning k-Determinantal Point Processes for Personalized RankingabstractThe key to personalized recommendation is to predict a personalized ranking on a catalog of items by modeling the user's preferences. There are many personalized ranking approaches for item recommendation from implicit feedback like Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) and listwise ranking. Despite these methods have shown performance benefits, there are still limitations affecting recommendation performance. First, none of them directly optimize ranking of sets, causing inadequate exploitation of correlations among multiple items. Second, the diversity aspect of recommendations is insufficiently addressed compared to relevance. In this work, we present a new optimization criterion LkP based on set probability comparison for personalized ranking that moves beyond traditional ranking-based methods. It for-malizes set-level relevance and diversity ranking comparisons through a Determinantal Point Process (DPP) kernel decom-position. To confer ranking interpretability to the DPP set probabilities and prioritize the practicality of LkP, we condition the standard DPP on the cardinality$k$of the DPP-distributed set, known as k-DPP, a less-explored extension of DPP. The generic stochastic gradient descent based technique can be directly applied to optimizing models that employ LkP. We implement LkP in the context of both Matrix Factorization (MF) and neural networks approaches, on three real-world datasets, obtaining improved relevance and diversity performances. LkP is broadly applicable, and when applied to existing recommendation models it also yields strong performance improvements, suggesting that LkP holds significant value to the field of recommender systems. Yuli Liu, Christian Walder, Lexing Xie |
ICDE | 2 |
| 2024 | Latent Optimal Paths by Gumbel Propagation for Variational Bayesian Dynamic ProgrammingabstractWe propose the stochastic optimal path which solves the classical optimal path problem by a probability-softening solution. This unified approach transforms a wide range of DP problems into directed acyclic graphs in which all paths follow a Gibbs distribution. We show the equivalence of the Gibbs distribution to a message-passing algorithm by the properties of the Gumbel distribution and give all the ingredients required for variational Bayesian inference of a latent path, namely Bayesian dynamic programming (BDP). We demonstrate the usage of BDP in the latent space of variational autoencoders (VAEs) and propose the BDP-VAE which captures structured sparse optimal paths as latent variables. This enables end-to-end training for generative tasks in which models rely on unobserved structural information. At last, we validate the behavior of our approach and showcase its applicability in two real-world applications: text-to-speech and singing voice synthesis. Our implementation code is available at https://github.com/XinleiNIU/LatentOptimalPathsBayesianDP. Xinlei Niu, Christian Walder, Jing Zhang 0052, Charles P. Martin |
ICML | 2 |
| 2024 | Probabilistic Attention for Sequential RecommendationabstractSequential Recommendation (SR) navigates users' dynamic preferences through modeling their historical interactions. The incorporation of the popular Transformer framework, which captures long relationships through pairwise dot products, has notably benefited SR. However, prevailing research in this domain faces three significant challenges: (i) Existing studies directly adopt the primary component of Transformer (i.e., the self-attention mechanism), without a clear explanation or tailored definition for its specific role in SR; (ii) The predominant focus on pairwise computations overlooks the global context or relative prevalence of item pairs within the overall sequence; (iii) Transformer primarily pursues relevance-dominated relationships, neglecting another essential objective in recommendation, i.e., diversity. In response, this work introduces a fresh perspective to elucidate the attention mechanism in SR. Here, attention is defined as dependency interactions among items, quantitatively determined under a global probabilistic model by observing the probabilities of corresponding item subsets. This viewpoint offers a precise and context-specific definition of attention, leading to the design of a distinctive attention mechanism tailored for SR. Specifically, we transmute the well-formulated global, repulsive interactions in Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) to effectively model dependency interactions. Guided by the repulsive interactions, a theoretically and practically feasible DPP kernel is designed, enabling our attention mechanism to directly consider category/topic distribution for enhancing diversity. Consequently, the Probabilistic Attention mechanism (PAtt) for sequential recommendation is developed. Experimental results demonstrate the excellent scalability and adaptability of our attention mechanism, which significantly improves recommendation performance in terms of both relevance and diversity. Yuli Liu, Christian Walder, Lexing Xie, Yiqun Liu 0001 |
KDD | 2 |
| 2023 | Humanly Certifying Superhuman Classifiers
Qiongkai Xu, Christian Walder |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2023 | R-U-SURE? Uncertainty-Aware Code Suggestions By Maximizing Utility Across Random User IntentsabstractLarge language models show impressive results at predicting structured text such as code, but also commonly introduce errors and hallucinations in their output. When used to assist software developers, these models may make mistakes that users must go back and fix, or worse, introduce subtle bugs that users may miss entirely. We propose Randomized Utility-driven Synthesis of Uncertain REgions (R-U-SURE), an approach for building uncertainty-aware suggestions based on a decision-theoretic model of goal-conditioned utility, using random samples from a generative model as a proxy for the unobserved possible intents of the end user. Our technique combines minimum-Bayes-risk decoding, dual decomposition, and decision diagrams in order to efficiently produce structured uncertainty summaries, given only sample access to an arbitrary generative model of code and an optional AST parser. We demonstrate R-U-SURE on three developer-assistance tasks, and show that it can be applied different user interaction patterns without retraining the model and leads to more accurate uncertainty estimates than token-probability baselines. We also release our implementation as an open-source library at https://github.com/google-research/r_u_sure. Daniel D. Johnson 0001, Daniel Tarlow, Christian Walder |
ICML | 3 |
| 2022 | EditVAE: Unsupervised Parts-Aware Controllable 3D Point Cloud Shape GenerationabstractThis paper tackles the problem of parts-aware point cloud generation. Unlike existing works which require the point cloud to be segmented into parts a priori, our parts-aware editing and generation are performed in an unsupervised manner. We achieve this with a simple modification of the Variational Auto-Encoder which yields a joint model of the point cloud itself along with a schematic representation of it as a combination of shape primitives. In particular, we introduce a latent representation of the point cloud which can be decomposed into a disentangled representation for each part of the shape. These parts are in turn disentangled into both a shape primitive and a point cloud representation, along with a standardising transformation to a canonical coordinate system. The dependencies between our standardising transformations preserve the spatial dependencies between the parts in a manner that allows meaningful parts-aware point cloud generation and shape editing. In addition to the flexibility afforded by our disentangled representation, the inductive bias introduced by our joint modeling approach yields state-of-the-art experimental results on the ShapeNet dataset. Shidi Li, Christian Walder |
AAAI | 3 |
| 2021 | TacticZero: Learning to Prove Theorems from Scratch with Deep Reinforcement LearningabstractWe propose a novel approach to interactive theorem-proving (ITP) using deep reinforcement learning. The proposed framework is able to learn proof search strategies as well as tactic and arguments prediction in an end-to-end manner. We formulate the process of ITP as a Markov decision process (MDP) in which each state represents a set of potential derivation paths. This structure allows us to introduce a novel backtracking mechanism which enables the agent to efficiently discard (predicted) dead-end derivations and restart the derivation from promising alternatives. We implement the framework in the HOL theorem prover. Experimental results show that the framework using learned search strategies outperforms existing automated theorem provers (i.e., hammers) available in HOL when evaluated on unseen problems. We further elaborate the role of key components of the framework using ablation studies. Minchao Wu, Michael Norrish, Christian Walder, Amir Dezfouli |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2020 | An Input Residual Connection for Simplifying Gated Recurrent Neural NetworksabstractGated Recurrent Neural Networks (GRNNs) are important models that continue to push the state-of-the-art solutions across different machine learning problems. However, they are composed of intricate components that are generally not well understood. We increase GRNN interpretability by linking the canonical Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) design to the well-studied Hopfield network. This connection allowed us to identify network redundancies, which we simplified with an Input Residual Connection (IRC). We tested GRNNs against their IRC counterparts on language modelling. In addition, we proposed an Input Highway Connection (IHC) as an advance application of the IRC and then evaluated the most widely applied GRNN of the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and IHC-LSTM on tasks of i) image generation and ii) learning to learn to update another learner-network. Despite parameter reductions, all IRC-GRNNs showed either comparative or superior generalisation than their baseline models. Furthermore, compared to LSTM, the IHC-LSTM removed 85.4% parameters on image generation. In conclusion, the IRC is applicable, but not limited, to the GRNN designs of GRUs and LSTMs but also to FastGRNNs, Simple Recurrent Units (SRUs), and Strongly-Typed Recurrent Neural Networks (T-RNNs). Nicholas I-Hsien Kuo, Mehrtash Harandi, Nicolas Fourrier, Christian Walder, Gabriela Ferraro, Hanna Suominen |
IJCNN | 4 |
| 2019 | SynthNet: Learning to Synthesize Music End-to-EndabstractWe consider the problem of learning a mapping directly from annotated music to waveforms, bypassing traditional single note synthesis. We propose a specific architecture based on WaveNet, a convolutional autoregressive generative model designed for text to speech. We investigate the representations learned by these models on music and concludethat mappings between musical notes and the instrument timbre can be learned directly from the raw audio coupled with the musical score, in binary piano roll format.Our model requires minimal training data (9 minutes), is substantially better in quality and converges 6 times faster in comparison to strong baselines in the form of powerful text to speech models.The quality of the generated waveforms (generation accuracy) is sufficiently high,that they are almost identical to the ground truth.Our evaluations are based on both the RMSE of the Constant-Q transform, and mean opinion scores from human subjects.We validate our work using 7 distinct synthetic instrument timbres, real cello music and also provide visualizations and links to all generated audio. Florin Schimbinschi, Christian Walder, Sarah M. Erfani, James Bailey 0001 |
IJCAI | 2 |
| 2016 | Modelling Symbolic Music: Beyond the Piano RollabstractIn this paper, we consider the problem of probabilistically modelling symbolic music data. We introduce a representation which reduces polyphonic music to a univariate categorical sequence. In this way, we are able to apply state of the art natural language processing techniques, namely the long short-term memory sequence model. The representation we employ permits arbitrary rhythmic structure, which we assume to be given. We show that our model is effective on all four piano roll based benchmark datasets. We further improve our model by augmenting our training data set with transpositions of the original pieces through all musical keys, thereby convincingly advancing the state of the art on these benchmark problems. We also fit models to music which is unconstrained in its rhythmic structure, discuss the properties of this model, and provide musical samples which are more sophisticated than previously possible with this class of recurrent neural network sequence models. We also provide our newly preprocessed data set of non piano-roll music data. To facilitate future work we describe and provide a new carefully preprocessed dataset of 19700 classical midi music files — significantly more than previously available. Christian Walder |
ACML | 1 |
| 2008 | Sparse multiscale gaussian process regressionabstractMost existing sparse Gaussian process (g.p.) models seek computational advantages by basing their computations on a set of m basis functions that are the covariance function of the g.p. with one of its two inputs fixed. We generalise this for the case of Gaussian covariance function, by basing our computations on m Gaussian basis functions with arbitrary diagonal covariance matrices (or length scales). For a fixed number of basis functions and any given criteria, this additional flexibility permits approximations no worse and typically better than was previously possible. We perform gradient based optimisation of the marginal likelihood, which costs O(m2n) time where n is the number of data points, and compare the method to various other sparse g.p. methods. Although we focus on g.p. regression, the central idea is applicable to all kernel based algorithms, and we also provide some results for the support vector machine (s.v.m.) and kernel ridge regression (k.r.r.). Our approach outperforms the other methods, particularly for the case of very few basis functions, i. e. a very high sparsity ratio. Christian Walder, Kwang In Kim, Bernhard Schölkopf |
ICML | 1 |
| 2008 | Diffeomorphic Dimensionality ReductionabstractThis paper introduces a new approach to constructing meaningful lower dimensional representations of sets of data points. We argue that constraining the mapping between the high and low dimensional spaces to be a diffeomorphism is a natural way of ensuring that pairwise distances are approximately preserved. Accordingly we develop an algorithm which diffeomorphically maps the data near to a lower dimensional subspace and then projects onto that subspace. The problem of solving for the mapping is transformed into one of solving for an Eulerian flow field which we compute using ideas from kernel methods. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on various real world data sets. Christian Walder, Bernhard Schölkopf |
NIPS | 1 |
| 2007 | Learning with Transformation Invariant KernelsabstractThis paper considers kernels invariant to translation, rotation and dilation. We show that no non-trivial positive definite (p.d.) kernels exist which are radial and dilation invariant, only conditionally positive definite (c.p.d.) ones. Accordingly, we discuss the c.p.d. case and provide some novel analysis, including an elemen- tary derivation of a c.p.d. representer theorem. On the practical side, we give a support vector machine (s.v.m.) algorithm for arbitrary c.p.d. kernels. For the thin- plate kernel this leads to a classifier with only one parameter (the amount of regu- larisation), which we demonstrate to be as effective as an s.v.m. with the Gaussian kernel, even though the Gaussian involves a second parameter (the length scale). Christian Walder, Olivier Chapelle |
NIPS | 1 |
| 2006 | Implicit Surfaces with Globally Regularised and Compactly Supported Basis FunctionsabstractWe consider the problem of constructing a function whose zero set is to represent a surface, given sample points with surface normal vectors. The contributions include a novel means of regularising multi-scale compactly supported basis functions that leads to the desirable properties previously only associated with fully supported bases, and show equivalence to a Gaussian process with modified covariance function. We also provide a regularisation framework for simpler and more direct treatment of surface normals, along with a corresponding generalisation of the representer theorem. We demonstrate the techniques on 3D problems of up to 14 million data points, as well as 4D time series data. Christian Walder, Bernhard Schölkopf, Olivier Chapelle |
NIPS | 1 |
| 2006 | Implicit Surface Modelling with a Globally Regularised Basis of Compact SupportabstractAbstract We consider the problem of constructing a globally smooth analytic function that represents a surface implicitly by way of its zero set, given sample points with surface normal vectors. The contributions of the paper include a novel means of regularising multi‐scale compactly supported basis functions that leads to the desirable interpolation properties previously only associated with fully supported bases. We also provide a regularisation framework for simpler and more direct treatment of surface normals, along with a corresponding generalisation of the representer theorem lying at the core of kernel‐based machine learning methods. We demonstrate the techniques on 3D problems of up to 14 million data points, as well as 4D time series data and four‐dimensional interpolation between three‐dimensional shapes. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Curve, surface, solid, and object representations Christian Walder, Bernhard Schölkopf, Olivier Chapelle |
Comput. Graph. Forum | 1 |
| 2005 | Implicit surface modelling as an eigenvalue problemabstractWe discuss the problem of fitting an implicit shape model to a set of points sampled from a co-dimension one manifold of arbitrary topology. The method solves a non-convex optimisation problem in the embedding function that defines the implicit by way of its zero level set. By assuming that the solution is a mixture of radial basis functions of varying widths we attain the globally optimal solution by way of an equivalent eigenvalue problem, without using or constructing as an intermediate step the normal vectors of the manifold at each data point. We demonstrate the system on two and three dimensional data, with examples of missing data interpolation and set operations on the resultant shapes. Christian Walder, Olivier Chapelle, Bernhard Schölkopf |
ICML | 1 |