Algorithms and Theory

This work presents a sparse-attention Transformer architecture for modeling documents that contain large tables. Tables are ubiquitous on the web, and are rich in information. However, more than 20% of relational tables on the web have 20 or more rows (Cafarella et al., 2008), and these large tables present a challenge for current Transformer models, which are typically limited to 512 tokens....

We develop new semiparametric methods for estimating treatment effects. We focus on a setting where the outcome distributions may be thick tailed, where treatment effects are small, where sample sizes are large and where assignment is completely random. This setting is of particular interest in recent experimentation in tech companies. We propose using parametric models for the treatment...

Successful knowledge graphs (KGs) solved the historical knowledge acquisition bottleneck by supplanting an expert focus with a simple, crowd-friendly one: KG nodes represent popular people, places, organizations, etc., and the graph arcs represent common sense relations like affiliations, locations, etc. Techniques for more general, categorical, KG curation do not seem to have made the same...

Generating alternative routes in road networks is an application of significant interest for online navigation systems. A high quality set of diverse alternate routes offers two functionalities - a) support support multiple (unknown) preferences that the user may have; and b) robust to changes in network conditions. We address the latter in this paper. The main techniques that produce...