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Researcher profile

Pierre Alquier

Pierre Alquier contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Machine Learningmath.STStatistics TheoryMethodologyComputationArtificial IntelligenceApplicationsmath.OCmath.PRQuantitative Methods

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Published work

14 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Estimation of time series by Maximum Mean Discrepancy

We define two minimum distance estimators for dependent data by minimizing some approximated Maximum Mean Discrepancy distances between the true empirical distribution of observations and their assumed (parametric) model distribution. When the latter one is intractable, it is approximated by simulation, allowing to accommodate most dynamic processes with latent variables. We derive the non-asymptotic and the large sample properties of our estimators in the context of absolutely regular/beta-mixing random elements. Our simulation experiments illustrate the robustness of our procedures to model misspecification, particularly in comparison with alternative standard estimation methods.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Position: agentic AI orchestration should be Bayes-consistent

LLMs excel at predictive tasks and complex reasoning tasks, but many high-value deployments rely on decisions under uncertainty, for example, which tool to call, which expert to consult, or how many resources to invest. While the usefulness and feasibility of Bayesian approaches remain unclear for LLM inference, this position paper argues that the control layer of an agentic AI system (that orchestrates LLMs and tools) is a clear case where Bayesian principles should shine. Bayesian decision theory provides a framework for agentic systems that can help to maintain beliefs over task-relevant latent quantities, to update these beliefs from observed agentic and human-AI interactions, and to choose actions. Making LLMs themselves explicitly Bayesian belief-updating engines remains computationally intensive and conceptually nontrivial as a general modeling target. In contrast, this paper argues that coherent decision-making requires Bayesian principles at the orchestration level of the agentic system, not necessarily the LLM agent parameters. This paper articulates practical properties for Bayesian control that fit modern agentic AI systems and human-AI collaboration, and provides concrete examples and design patterns to illustrate how calibrated beliefs and utility-aware policies can improve agentic AI orchestration.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Deviation inequalities for stochastic approximation by averaging

We introduce a class of Markov chains, that contains the model of stochastic approximation by averaging and non-averaging. Using martingale approximation method, we establish various deviation inequalities for separately Lipschitz functions of such a chain, with different moment conditions on some dominating random variables of martingale differences.Finally, we apply these inequalities to the stochastic approximation by averaging and empirical risk minimisation.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Estimation of copulas via Maximum Mean Discrepancy

This paper deals with robust inference for parametric copula models. Estimation using Canonical Maximum Likelihood might be unstable, especially in the presence of outliers. We propose to use a procedure based on the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) principle. We derive non-asymptotic oracle inequalities, consistency and asymptotic normality of this new estimator. In particular, the oracle inequality holds without any assumption on the copula family, and can be applied in the presence of outliers or under misspecification. Moreover, in our MMD framework, the statistical inference of copula models for which there exists no density with respect to the Lebesgue measure on $[0,1]^d$, as the Marshall-Olkin copula, becomes feasible. A simulation study shows the robustness of our new procedures, especially compared to pseudo-maximum likelihood estimation. An R package implementing the MMD estimator for copula models is available.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Optimal quasi-Bayesian reduced rank regression with incomplete response

The aim of reduced rank regression is to connect multiple response variables to multiple predictors. This model is very popular, especially in biostatistics where multiple measurements on individuals can be re-used to predict multiple outputs. Unfortunately, there are often missing data in such datasets, making it difficult to use standard estimation tools. In this paper, we study the problem of reduced rank regression where the response matrix is incomplete. We propose a quasi-Bayesian approach to this problem, in the sense that the likelihood is replaced by a quasi-likelihood. We provide a tight oracle inequality, proving that our method is adaptive to the rank of the coefficient matrix. We describe a Langevin Monte Carlo algorithm for the computation of the posterior mean. Numerical comparison on synthetic and real data show that our method are competitive to the state-of-the-art where the rank is chosen by cross validation, and sometimes lead to an improvement.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Tight Risk Bound for High Dimensional Time Series Completion

Initially designed for independent datas, low-rank matrix completion was successfully applied in many domains to the reconstruction of partially observed high-dimensional time series. However, there is a lack of theory to support the application of these methods to dependent datas. In this paper, we propose a general model for multivariate, partially observed time series. We show that the least-square method with a rank penalty leads to reconstruction error of the same order as for independent datas. Moreover, when the time series has some additional properties such as periodicity or smoothness, the rate can actually be faster than in the independent case.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

A Theoretical Analysis of Catastrophic Forgetting through the NTK Overlap Matrix

Continual learning (CL) is a setting in which an agent has to learn from an incoming stream of data during its entire lifetime. Although major advances have been made in the field, one recurring problem which remains unsolved is that of Catastrophic Forgetting (CF). While the issue has been extensively studied empirically, little attention has been paid from a theoretical angle. In this paper, we show that the impact of CF increases as two tasks increasingly align. We introduce a measure of task similarity called the NTK overlap matrix which is at the core of CF. We analyze common projected gradient algorithms and demonstrate how they mitigate forgetting. Then, we propose a variant of Orthogonal Gradient Descent (OGD) which leverages structure of the data through Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Experiments support our theoretical findings and show how our method can help reduce CF on classical CL datasets.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Non-exponentially weighted aggregation: regret bounds for unbounded loss functions

We tackle the problem of online optimization with a general, possibly unbounded, loss function. It is well known that when the loss is bounded, the exponentially weighted aggregation strategy (EWA) leads to a regret in $\sqrt{T}$ after $T$ steps. In this paper, we study a generalized aggregation strategy, where the weights no longer depend exponentially on the losses. Our strategy is based on Follow The Regularized Leader (FTRL): we minimize the expected losses plus a regularizer, that is here a $ϕ$-divergence. When the regularizer is the Kullback-Leibler divergence, we obtain EWA as a special case. Using alternative divergences enables unbounded losses, at the cost of a worst regret bound in some cases.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Understanding the population structure correction regression

Although genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on complex traits have achieved great successes, the current leading GWAS approaches simply perform to test each genotype-phenotype association separately for each genetic variant. Curiously, the statistical properties for using these approaches is not known when a joint model for the whole genetic variants is considered. Here we advance in GWAS in understanding the statistical properties of the "population structure correction" (PSC) approach, a standard univariate approach in GWAS. We further propose and analyse a correction to the PSC approach, termed as "corrected population correction" (CPC). Together with the theoretical results, numerical simulations show that CPC is always comparable or better than PSC, with a dramatic improvement in some special cases.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

High dimensional VAR with low rank transition

We propose a vector auto-regressive (VAR) model with a low-rank constraint on the transition matrix. This new model is well suited to predict high-dimensional series that are highly correlated, or that are driven by a small number of hidden factors. We study estimation, prediction, and rank selection for this model in a very general setting. Our method shows excellent performances on a wide variety of simulated datasets. On macro-economic data from Giannone et al. (2015), our method is competitive with state-of-the-art methods in small dimension, and even improves on them in high dimension.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2019arXiv

A Generalization Bound for Online Variational Inference

Bayesian inference provides an attractive online-learning framework to analyze sequential data, and offers generalization guarantees which hold even with model mismatch and adversaries. Unfortunately, exact Bayesian inference is rarely feasible in practice and approximation methods are usually employed, but do such methods preserve the generalization properties of Bayesian inference ? In this paper, we show that this is indeed the case for some variational inference (VI) algorithms. We consider a few existing online, tempered VI algorithms, as well as a new algorithm, and derive their generalization bounds. Our theoretical result relies on the convexity of the variational objective, but we argue that the result should hold more generally and present empirical evidence in support of this. Our work in this paper presents theoretical justifications in favor of online algorithms relying on approximate Bayesian methods.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2019arXiv

Exponential inequalities for nonstationary Markov Chains

Exponential inequalities are main tools in machine learning theory. To prove exponential inequalities for non i.i.d random variables allows to extend many learning techniques to these variables. Indeed, much work has been done both on inequalities and learning theory for time series, in the past 15 years. However, for the non independent case, almost all the results concern stationary time series. This excludes many important applications: for example any series with a periodic behavior is non-stationary. In this paper, we extend the basic tools of Dedecker and Fan (2015) to nonstationary Markov chains. As an application, we provide a Bernstein-type inequality, and we deduce risk bounds for the prediction of periodic autoregressive processes with an unknown period.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2019arXiv

Matrix factorization for multivariate time series analysis

Matrix factorization is a powerful data analysis tool. It has been used in multivariate time series analysis, leading to the decomposition of the series in a small set of latent factors. However, little is known on the statistical performances of matrix factorization for time series. In this paper, we extend the results known for matrix estimation in the i.i.d setting to time series. Moreover, we prove that when the series exhibit some additional structure like periodicity or smoothness, it is possible to improve on the classical rates of convergence.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2018arXiv

Consistency of Variational Bayes Inference for Estimation and Model Selection in Mixtures

Mixture models are widely used in Bayesian statistics and machine learning, in particular in computational biology, natural language processing and many other fields. Variational inference, a technique for approximating intractable posteriors thanks to optimization algorithms, is extremely popular in practice when dealing with complex models such as mixtures. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we study the concentration of variational approximations of posteriors, which is still an open problem for general mixtures, and we derive consistency and rates of convergence. We also tackle the problem of model selection for the number of components: we study the approach already used in practice, which consists in maximizing a numerical criterion (the Evidence Lower Bound). We prove that this strategy indeed leads to strong oracle inequalities. We illustrate our theoretical results by applications to Gaussian and multinomial mixtures.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access