Europe
Bridging the Gap Between Climate Science and Machine Learning in Climate Model Emulation
Schmidt, Luca, Effenberger, Nina
While climate models provide insights for climate decision-making, their use is constrained by significant computational and technical demands. Although machine learning (ML) emulators offer a way to bypass the high computational costs, their effective use remains challenging. The hurdles are diverse, ranging from limited accessibility and a lack of specialized knowledge to a general mistrust of ML methods that are perceived as insufficiently physical. Here, we introduce a framework to overcome these barriers by integrating both climate science and machine learning perspectives. We find that designing easy-to-adopt emulators that address a clearly defined task and demonstrating their reliability offers a promising path for bridging the gap between our two fields.
Beyond the Mean: Distribution-Aware Loss Functions for Bimodal Regression
Mohammadi-Seif, Abolfazl, Soares, Carlos, Ribeiro, Rita P., Baeza-Yates, Ricardo
Despite the strong predictive performance achieved by machine learning models across many application domains, assessing their trustworthiness through reliable estimates of predictive confidence remains a critical challenge. This issue arises in scenarios where the likelihood of error inferred from learned representations follows a bimodal distribution, resulting from the coexistence of confident and ambiguous predictions. Standard regression approaches often struggle to adequately express this predictive uncertainty, as they implicitly assume unimodal Gaussian noise, leading to mean-collapse behavior in such settings. Although Mixture Density Networks (MDNs) can represent different distributions, they suffer from severe optimization instability. We propose a family of distribution-aware loss functions integrating normalized RMSE with Wasserstein and Cramรฉr distances. When applied to standard deep regression models, our approach recovers bimodal distributions without the volatility of mixture models. Validated across four experimental stages, our results show that the proposed Wasserstein loss establishes a new Pareto efficiency frontier: matching the stability of standard regression losses like MSE in unimodal tasks while reducing Jensen-Shannon Divergence by 45% on complex bimodal datasets. Our framework strictly dominates MDNs in both fidelity and robustness, offering a reliable tool for aleatoric uncertainty estimation in trustworthy AI systems.
SPDE Methods for Nonparametric Bayesian Posterior Contraction and Laplace Approximation
Alberola-Boloix, Enric, Casado-Telletxea, Ioar
We derive posterior contraction rates (PCRs) and finite-sample Bernstein von Mises (BvM) results for non-parametric Bayesian models by extending the diffusion-based framework of Mou et al. (2024) to the infinite-dimensional setting. The posterior is represented as the invariant measure of a Langevin stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) on a separable Hilbert space, which allows us to control posterior moments and obtain non-asymptotic concentration rates in Hilbert norms under various likelihood curvature and regularity conditions. We also establish a quantitative Laplace approximation for the posterior. The theory is illustrated in a nonparametric linear Gaussian inverse problem.
Decorrelation, Diversity, and Emergent Intelligence: The Isomorphism Between Social Insect Colonies and Ensemble Machine Learning
Fokouรฉ, Ernest, Babbitt, Gregory, Levental, Yuval
Social insect colonies and ensemble machine learning methods represent two of the most successful examples of decentralized information processing in nature and computation respectively. Here we develop a rigorous mathematical framework demonstrating that ant colony decision-making and random forest learning are isomorphic under a common formalism of \textbf{stochastic ensemble intelligence}. We show that the mechanisms by which genetically identical ants achieve functional differentiation -- through stochastic response to local cues and positive feedback -- map precisely onto the bootstrap aggregation and random feature subsampling that decorrelate decision trees. Using tools from Bayesian inference, multi-armed bandit theory, and statistical learning theory, we prove that both systems implement identical variance reduction strategies through decorrelation of identical units. We derive explicit mappings between ant recruitment rates and tree weightings, pheromone trail reinforcement and out-of-bag error estimation, and quorum sensing and prediction averaging. This isomorphism suggests that collective intelligence, whether biological or artificial, emerges from a universal principle: \textbf{randomized identical agents + diversity-enforcing mechanisms $\rightarrow$ emergent optimality}.
Algorithmic warm starts for Hamiltonian Monte Carlo
Zhang, Matthew S., Altschuler, Jason M., Chewi, Sinho
Generating samples from a continuous probability density is a central algorithmic problem across statistics, engineering, and the sciences. For high-dimensional settings, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is the default algorithm across mainstream software packages. However, despite the extensive line of work on HMC and its widespread empirical success, it remains unclear how many iterations of HMC are required as a function of the dimension $d$. On one hand, a variety of results show that Metropolized HMC converges in $O(d^{1/4})$ iterations from a warm start close to stationarity. On the other hand, Metropolized HMC is significantly slower without a warm start, e.g., requiring $ฮฉ(d^{1/2})$ iterations even for simple target distributions such as isotropic Gaussians. Finding a warm start is therefore the computational bottleneck for HMC. We resolve this issue for the well-studied setting of sampling from a probability distribution satisfying strong log-concavity (or isoperimetry) and third-order derivative bounds. We prove that \emph{non-Metropolized} HMC generates a warm start in $\tilde{O}(d^{1/4})$ iterations, after which we can exploit the warm start using Metropolized HMC. Our final complexity of $\tilde{O}(d^{1/4})$ is the fastest algorithm for high-accuracy sampling under these assumptions, improving over the prior best of $\tilde{O}(d^{1/2})$. This closes the long line of work on the dimensional complexity of MHMC for such settings, and also provides a simple warm-start prescription for practical implementations.
Privacy-Preserving Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback via Decoupled Reward Modeling
Cho, Young Hyun, Sun, Will Wei
Preference-based fine-tuning has become an important component in training large language models, and the data used at this stage may contain sensitive user information. A central question is how to design a differentially private pipeline that is well suited to the distinct structure of reinforcement learning from human feedback. We propose a privacy-preserving framework that imposes differential privacy only on reward learning and derives the final policy from the resulting private reward model. Theoretically, we study the suboptimality gap and show that privacy contributes an additional additive term beyond the usual non-private statistical error. We also establish a minimax lower bound and show that the dominant term changes with sample size and privacy level, which in turn characterizes regimes in which the upper bound is rate-optimal up to logarithmic factors. Empirically, synthetic experiments confirm the scaling predicted by the theory, and experiments on the Anthropic HH-RLHF dataset using the Gemma-2B-IT model show stronger private alignment performance than existing differentially private baseline methods across privacy budgets.
A Theoretical Framework for Energy-Aware Gradient Pruning in Federated Learning
Federated Learning (FL) is constrained by the communication and energy limitations of decentralized edge devices. While gradient sparsification via Top-K magnitude pruning effectively reduces the communication payload, it remains inherently energy-agnostic. It assumes all parameter updates incur identical downstream transmission and memory-update costs, ignoring hardware realities. We formalize the pruning process as an energy-constrained projection problem that accounts for the hardware-level disparities between memory-intensive and compute-efficient operations during the post-backpropagation phase. We propose Cost-Weighted Magnitude Pruning (CWMP), a selection rule that prioritizes parameter updates based on their magnitude relative to their physical cost. We demonstrate that CWMP is the optimal greedy solution to this constrained projection and provide a probabilistic analysis of its global energy efficiency. Numerical results on a non-IID CIFAR-10 benchmark show that CWMP consistently establishes a superior performance-energy Pareto frontier compared to the Top-K baseline.
Graph Energy Matching: Transport-Aligned Energy-Based Modeling for Graph Generation
Balcerak, Michal, Shit, Suprosana, Prabhakar, Chinmay, Kaltenbach, Sebastian, Albergo, Michael S., Du, Yilun, Menze, Bjoern
Energy-based models for discrete domains, such as graphs, explicitly capture relative likelihoods, naturally enabling composable probabilistic inference tasks like conditional generation or enforcing constraints at test-time. However, discrete energy-based models typically struggle with efficient and high-quality sampling, as off-support regions often contain spurious local minima, trapping samplers and causing training instabilities. This has historically resulted in a fidelity gap relative to discrete diffusion models. We introduce Graph Energy Matching (GEM), a generative framework for graphs that closes this fidelity gap. Motivated by the transport map optimization perspective of the Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (JKO) scheme, GEM learns a permutation-invariant potential energy that simultaneously provides transport-aligned guidance from noise toward data and refines samples within regions of high data likelihood. Further, we introduce a sampling protocol that leverages an energy-based switch to seamlessly bridge: (i) rapid, gradient-guided transport toward high-probability regions to (ii) a mixing regime for exploration of the learned graph distribution. On molecular graph benchmarks, GEM matches or exceeds strong discrete diffusion baselines. Beyond sample quality, explicit modeling of relative likelihood enables targeted exploration at inference time, facilitating compositional generation, property-constrained sampling, and geodesic interpolation between graphs.
High-Resolution Tensor-Network Fourier Methods for Exponentially Compressed Non-Gaussian Aggregate Distributions
Rodrรญguez-Aldavero, Juan Josรฉ, Garcรญa-Ripoll, Juan Josรฉ
Its low-rank QTT structure arises from intrinsic spectral smoothness in continuous models, or from spectral energy concentration as the number of components D grows in discrete models. We demonstrate this on weighted sums of Bernoulli and lognormal random variables. In the latter, the approach reaches high-resolution discretizations of N = 230 frequency modes on standard hardware, far beyond the N =224 ceiling of dense implementations. These compressed representations enable efficient computation of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES), supporting applications in quantitative finance and beyond. I. INTRODUCTION Weighted sums of independent random variables constitute a basic probabilistic model, describing macroscopic behavior arising from the aggregation of microscopic stochastic components. These models arise in a wide range of applications. Their probability distribution generally lacks a closed-form expression, and their evaluation involves multidimensional convolution integrals that are susceptible to the curse of dimensionality. Consequently, evaluating these models relies on specializednumericalmethods. Whilethese methods have been adapted for discrete settings [18, 19], they are frequently hampered by persistent Gibbs oscillations, which arise from distributional discontinuities and preclude uniform convergence [20, 21]. No existing method simultaneously achieves an accurate approximation of the exact, fully non-Gaussian target distribution while remaining scalable to larger, practically relevant system sizes. In this work, we introduce a new algorithm that combines the Fourier spectral method with tensor-network techniques.
A PAC-Bayesian approach to generalization for quantum models
Rodriguez-Grasa, Pablo, Caro, Matthias C., Eisert, Jens, Gil-Fuster, Elies, Schreiber, Franz J., Bravo-Prieto, Carlos
Generalization is a central concept in machine learning theory, yet for quantum models, it is predominantly analyzed through uniform bounds that depend on a model's overall capacity rather than the specific function learned. These capacity-based uniform bounds are often too loose and entirely insensitive to the actual training and learning process. Previous theoretical guarantees have failed to provide non-uniform, data-dependent bounds that reflect the specific properties of the learned solution rather than the worst-case behavior of the entire hypothesis class. To address this limitation, we derive the first PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for a broad class of quantum models by analyzing layered circuits composed of general quantum channels, which include dissipative operations such as mid-circuit measurements and feedforward. Through a channel perturbation analysis, we establish non-uniform bounds that depend on the norms of learned parameter matrices; we extend these results to symmetry-constrained equivariant quantum models; and we validate our theoretical framework with numerical experiments. This work provides actionable model design insights and establishes a foundational tool for a more nuanced understanding of generalization in quantum machine learning.