Publications & Preprints

The publications and preprints are sorted chronologically. For the most updated list, see my Google Scholar.

Publications

1. Self-Improvement in Language Models: The Sharpening Mechanism N Audrey Huang, Adam Block, Dylan J. Foster, Dhruv Rohatgi, Cyril Zhang, Max Simchowitz, Jordan T. Ash, and Akshay Krishnamurthy [https:arxiv.orgabs2412.01951 ICLR 2025 (Oral)
   

2. Is Behavior Cloning All You Need? Understanding Horizon in Imitation Learning
   Dylan Foster, Adam Block, and Dipendra Misra arxiv
   Neurips 2024 (Spotlight)
   

3. Oracle-Efficient Differentially Private Learning with Public Data
   Adam Block, Mark Bun, Rathin Desai, Abhishek Shetty, and Zhiwei Steven Wu. arxiv
   Neurips 2024
   

4. On the Performance of Empirical Risk Minimization with Smoothed Data
   Adam Block, Alexander Rakhlin, and Abhishek Shetty. arxiv
   COLT 2024
   

5. Butterfly Effects of SGD Noise: Error Amplification in Behavior Cloning and Autoregression
   Adam Block, Dylan J. Foster, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Max Simchowitz, and Cyril Zhang. arxiv
   ICLR 2024
   

6. Smoothed Online Learning for Prediction in Piecewise Affine Systems
   Adam Block, Max Simchowitz, and Russ Tedrake. arxiv
   Neurips 2023 (Spotlight)
   

7. Efficient Model-Free Exploration in Low-Rank MDPs
   Zak Mhammedi, Adam Block, Dylan Foster, and Alexander Rakhlin. arxiv
   NeurIPS 2023
   

8. On the Imitation of Non-Markovian Demonstrations: From Low-Level Stability to High Level Planning
   Adam Block, Ali Jadbabaie, Daniel Pfrommer, Max Simchowitz, and Russ Tedrake. arxiv
   NeurIPS 2023
   Workshop on Optimal Transport in Learning, Control, and Dynamical Systems, ICML 2023
   

9. Oracle-Efficient Smoothed Online Learning for Piecewise Continuous Decision Making
   Adam Block, Max Simchowitz, and Alexander Rakhlin. COLT 2023. arxiv

10. The Sample Complexity of Approximate Rejection Sampling With Applications to Smoothed Online Learning
    Adam Block and Yury Polyanskiy. COLT 2023. arxiv

11. Efficient and Near-Optimal Smoothed Online Learning for Generalized Linear Functions
    Adam Block and Max Simchowitz. NeurIPS 2022. arxiv

12. Intrinsic Dimension Estimation using Wasserstein Distance
    Adam Block, Zeyu Jia, Yury Polyanskiy, and Alexander Rakhlin. Journal of Machine Learning Research (Accepted 2022). arxiv

13. Smoothed Online Learning is as Easy as Statistical Learning
    Adam Block, Yuval Dagan, Noah Golowich, and Alexander Rakhlin. COLT 2022. arxiv

14. Counterfactual Learning To Rank for Utility-Maximizing Query Autocompletion
    Adam Block, Rahul Kidambi, Thorsten Joachims, Daniel N. Hill, and Inderjit S. Dhillon. SIGIR 2022. arxiv

15. Majorizing Measures, Sequential Complexities, and Online Learning
    Adam Block, Yuval Dagan, and Alexander Rakhlin. COLT 2021. arxiv

Preprints

1. Is Best-of-N the Best of Them? Coverage, Scaling, and Optimality in Inference-Time Alignment
   Audrey Huang, Adam Block, Qinghua Liu, Nan Jiang, Dylan J. Foster, Akshay Krishnamurthy. arxiv
   

2. A Theory of Learning with Autoregressive Chain of Thought
   Nirmit Joshi, Gal Vardi, Adam Block, Surbhi Goel, Zhiyuan Li, Theodor Misiakiewicz, Nathan Srebro. arxiv

3. Computational-Statistical Tradeoffs at the Next-Token Prediction Barrier: Autoregressive and Imitation Learning under Misspecification
   Dhruv Rohatgi, Adam Block, Audrey Huang, Akshay Krishnamurthy, and Dylan Foster. arxiv

4. Small Loss Bounds for Online Learning Separated Function Classes: A Gaussian Process Perspective
   Adam Block and Abhishek Shetty. arxiv

5. GaussMark: A Practical Approach for Structural Watermarking of Language Models
   Adam Block, Ayush Sekhari, and Alexander Rakhlin. arxiv

6. Rate of Convergence of the Smoothed empirical Wasserstein Distance
   Adam Block, Zeyu Jia, Yury Polyanskiy, and Alexander Rakhlin. arxiv

7. Fast mixing of multi-scale langevin dynamics underthe manifold hypothesis
   Adam Block, Youssef Mroueh, Jerret Ross, and Alexander Rakhlin. arxiv

8. Generative modeling with denoising auto-encoders and Langevin sampling
   Adam Block, Youssef Mroueh, and Alexander Rakhlin. arxiv