We introduce the framework of performative control, where the policy chosen by the controller affects the underlying dynamics of the control system.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted considerable attention due to their diverse applications.

The use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has improved Large Language Models (LLMs) in collaborating with external data, yet significant challenges exist in real-world scenarios. In areas such as academic literature and finance question answering, data are often found in raw text and tables in HTML or PDF formats, which can be lengthy and highly unstructured. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark suite, namely Unstructured Document Analysis (UDA), that involves 2,965 real-world documents and 29,590 expert-annotated Q&A pairs. We revisit popular LLMand RAG-based solutions for document analysis and evaluate the design choices and answer qualities across multiple document domains and diverse query types. Our evaluation yields interesting findings and highlights the importance of data parsing and retrieval. We hope our benchmark can shed light and better serve real-world document analysis applications.

The prior and likelihood are both modelling choices. Since (14) is intractable, we typically sample a finite set of parameters and compute a Monte Carlo estimator. A.1 Likelihoods for BNNs The likelihood is purely a function of the model prediction Φ As such, BNN likelihood distributions follow the standard choices used in other probabilistic models. Neal [21] shows that in the regression setting, the isotropic Gaussian prior for a BNN with a single hidden layer approaches a Gaussian process prior as the number of hidden units tends to infinity, so long as the chosen activation function is bounded. We will use this prior in the baseline BNN for our experiments.

Predictive combinatorial optimization, where the parameters of combinatorial optimization (CO) are unknown at the decision-making time, is the precise modeling of many real-world applications, including energy cost-aware scheduling and budget allocation on advertising. Tackling such a problem usually involves a prediction model and a CO solver. These two modules are integrated into the predictive CO pipeline following two design principles: "Predict-then-Optimize (PtO)", which learns predictions by supervised training and subsequently solves CO using predicted coefficients, while the other, named "Predict-and-Optimize (PnO)", directly optimizes towards the ultimate decision quality and claims to yield better decisions than traditional PtO approaches. However, there lacks a systematic benchmark of both approaches, including the specific design choices at the module level, as well as an evaluation dataset that covers representative real-world scenarios. To this end, we develop a modular framework to benchmark 11 existing PtO/PnO methods on 8 problems, including a new industrial dataset for combinatorial advertising that will be released. Our study shows that PnO approaches are better than PtO on 7 out of 8 benchmarks, but there is no silver bullet found for the specific design choices of PnO. A comprehensive categorization of current approaches and integration of typical scenarios are provided under a unified benchmark. Therefore, this paper could serve as a comprehensive benchmark for future PnO approach development and also offer fast prototyping for application-focused development.

With the arrival of the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) have emerged to obtain possible quantum advantage. In particular, how to effectively incorporate hard constraints in VQAs remains a critical and open question. In this paper, we manage to seamlessly combine the Hamming Weight Preserving ansatz with a topological-aware parity check on physical qubits to enforce error mitigation and further hard constraints. We demonstrate such a combination significantly outperforms peer VQA methods on both quantum chemistry problems and constrained combinatorial optimization problems e.g.

The recently-proposed framework of Predict+Optimize tackles optimization problems with parameters that are unknown at solving time, in a supervised learning setting. Prior frameworks consider only the scenario where all unknown parameters are (eventually) revealed at the same time. In this work, we propose Multi-Stage Predict+Optimize, a novel extension catering to applications where unknown parameters are instead revealed in sequential stages, with optimization decisions made in between. We further develop three training algorithms for neural networks (NNs) for our framework as proof of concept, all of which can handle mixed integer linear programs. The first baseline algorithm is a natural extension of prior work, training a single NN which makes a single prediction of unknown parameters.

By now, you've likely already heard that some companies want to replace human workers with AI. Now, the CEO of one of the biggest AI companies is warning that AI may be coming for your job sooner than expected. In an interview with Axios, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that AI could "wipe out" as much as half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Amodei, who runs the OpenAI competitor behind the ChatGPT rival Claude, said that the resulting job loss would cause a spike in unemployment as high as 20 percent in the next five years. Just this week, Mashable covered a new report which found that AI is already affecting the number of entry-level jobs in the tech sector and, in turn, young people who've just graduated into the workforce.

Gaussian processes (GPs) are non-parametric probabilistic regression models that are popular due to their flexibility, data efficiency, and well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. However, standard GP models assume homoskedastic Gaussian noise, while many real-world applications are subject to non-Gaussian corruptions. Variants of GPs that are more robust to alternative noise models have been proposed, and entail significant trade-offs between accuracy and robustness, and between computational requirements and theoretical guarantees. In this work, we propose and study a GP model that achieves robustness against sparse outliers by inferring data-point-specific noise levels with a sequential selection procedure maximizing the log marginal likelihood that we refer to as relevance pursuit. We show, surprisingly, that the model can be parameterized such that the associated log marginal likelihood is strongly concave in the data-point-specific noise variances, a property rarely found in either robust regression objectives or GP marginal likelihoods. This in turn implies the weak submodularity of the corresponding subset selection problem, and thereby proves approximation guarantees for the proposed algorithm. We compare the model's performance relative to other approaches on diverse regression and Bayesian optimization tasks, including the challenging but common setting of sparse corruptions of the labels within or close to the function range.

The pursuit of fairness in machine learning (ML), ensuring that the models do not exhibit biases toward protected demographic groups, typically results in a compromise scenario. This compromise can be explained by a Pareto frontier where given certain resources (e.g., data), reducing the fairness violations often comes at the cost of lowering the model accuracy. In this work, we aim to train models that mitigate group fairness disparity without causing harm to model accuracy. Intuitively, acquiring more data is a natural and promising approach to achieve this goal by reaching a better Pareto frontier of the fairness-accuracy tradeoff. The current data acquisition methods, such as fair active learning approaches, typically require annotating sensitive attributes.