Education
OWL: Optimized Workforce Learning General Multi-Agent Assistance for Real-World Task Automation
Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems show promise for automating real-world tasks but struggle to transfer across domains due to their domain-specific nature. Current approaches face two critical shortcomings: they require complete architectural redesign and full retraining of all components when applied to new domains. We introduce WORKFORCE, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that decouples strategic planning from specialized execution through a modular architecture comprising: (i) a domain-agnostic Planner for task decomposition, (ii) a Coordinator for subtask management, and (iii) specialized Workers with domain-specific tool-calling capabilities.
Bigger, Regularized, Categorical: High-Capacity Value Functions are Efficient Multi-Task Learners
This paradigm has had limited impact in value-based reinforcement learning (RL), where improvements are often driven by small models trained in a single-task context. This is because in multi-task RL sparse rewards and gradient conflicts make optimization of temporal difference brittle. Practical workflows for generalist policies therefore avoid online training, instead cloning expert trajectories or distilling collections of single-task policies into one agent. In this work, we show that the use of high-capacity value models trained via crossentropy and conditioned on learnable task embeddings addresses the problem of task interference in online RL, allowing for robust and scalable multi-task training. We test our approach on 7 multi-task benchmarks with over 280 unique tasks, spanning high degree-of-freedom humanoid control and discrete vision-based RL. We find that, despite its simplicity, the proposed approach leads to state-of-the-art single and multi-task performance, as well as sample-efficient transfer to new tasks.
Stable Port-Hamiltonian Neural Networks
In recent years, nonlinear dynamic system identification using artificial neural networks has garnered attention due to its broad potential applications across science and engineering. However, purely data-driven approaches often struggle with extrapolation and may yield physically implausible forecasts. Furthermore, the learned dynamics can exhibit instabilities, making it difficult to apply such models safely and robustly. This article introduces stable port-Hamiltonian neural networks, a machine learning architecture that incorporates physical biases of energy conservation and dissipation while ensuring global Lyapunov stability of the learned dynamics. Through illustrative and real-world examples, we demonstrate that these strong inductive biases facilitate robust learning of stable dynamics from sparse data, while avoiding instability and surpassing purely data-driven approaches in accuracy and physically meaningful generalization. Furthermore, the model's applicability and potential for data-driven surrogate modeling are showcased on multiphysics simulation data.
Proximal Mediation Analysis with Hidden Recanting Witnesses
Wu, Sihan, Bai, Yang, Cui, Yifan
Mediation analysis is essential for decomposing the causal effect of a treatment into direct and indirect pathways. However, many practical settings rely on the stringent assumption that recanting witnesses, defined as treatment-induced mediator-outcome confounders, are either absent or fully known a priori. Such a requirement is often untenable, especially when these variables remain unobservable due to measurement difficulties or privacy constraints. In this paper, we leverage proximal causal inference to develop three novel identification strategies to address the challenge of identifying path-specific effects in the presence of unknown recanting witnesses. Building on this, we develop a semiparametric inference framework that derives the efficient influence function and proposes a proximal multiply robust estimator, which remains consistent if at least one set of nuisance models is correctly specified. When all nuisance models are correctly specified and converge at appropriate rates, the estimator is asymptotically normal and achieves the semiparametric efficiency bound. We provide a minimax optimization-based debiased machine learning procedure for point estimation and constructing valid confidence intervals. The performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated by simulation studies and a real data application.
Data augmented bootstrap: Unifying confidence interval construction by approximate invariance
We propose the data augmented bootstrap (DAB), a framework for constructing confidence intervals from approximately invariant transformations of the data. As special cases, DAB recovers popular methods that rely on exact group symmetries, such as conformal prediction, wild bootstrap for Maximum Mean Discrepancy U-statistics and the recently proposed SymmPI. Meanwhile, DAB also recovers the classical bootstrap method, which exploits the dataset's approximate invariance under uniform sampling of data indices as the dataset size grows. For all DAB methods, we establish theoretical coverage results that interpolate between finite-sample and asymptotic guarantees according to the strength of the invariance, and without assuming a group structure. The approximate invariance is measured in the Kolmogorov distance and, for statistics that satisfy Gaussian universality, reduces to conditional mean and variance matching. This allows us to incorporate data augmentation (DA), a widely used machine learning heuristic based on approximate invariances, into known statistical methods. We empirically test the performance of incorporating DA into bootstrap, wild bootstrap and conformal prediction for simulated settings as well as for image, language and scientific data.
Enhancing Interpretability in Deep Reinforcement Learning through Semantic Clustering
In this paper, we explore semantic clustering properties of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to improve its interpretability and deepen our understanding of its internal semantic organization. In this context, semantic clustering refers to the ability of neural networks to cluster inputs based on their semantic similarity in the feature space. We propose a DRL architecture that incorporates a novel semantic clustering module that combines feature dimensionality reduction with online clustering.
AScalable, Causal, and Energy Efficient Framework for Neural Decoding with Spiking Neural Networks
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to enable vital functions, such as speech and prosthetic control, for individuals with neuromotor impairments. Central to their success are neural decoders, models that map neural activity to intended behavior. Current learning-based decoding approaches fall into two classes: simple, causal models that lack generalization, or complex, non-causal models that generalize and scale offline but struggle in real-time settings. Both face a common challenge, their reliance on power-hungry artificial neural network backbones, which makes integration into real-world, resource-limited systems difficult.
Mellow: a small audio language model for reasoning
Multimodal Audio-Language Models (ALMs) can understand and reason over both audio and text. Typically, reasoning performance correlates with model size, with the best results achieved by models exceeding 8 billion parameters. However, no prior work has explored enabling small audio-language models to perform reasoning tasks, despite the potential applications for edge devices. To address this gap, we introduce Mellow, a small Audio-Language Model specifically designed for reasoning. Mellow achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing small audio-language models and surpasses several larger models in reasoning capabilities. For instance, Mellow scores 52.11 on MMAU, comparable to SoTAQwen2 Audio (which scores 52.5) while using 50 times fewer parameters and being trained on 60 times less data (audio hrs).
MAGNET: AMulti-agent Framework for Finding Audio-Visual Needles by Reasoning over Multi-Video Haystacks
Large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown remarkable progress in audiovisual understanding, yet they struggle with real-world scenarios that require complex reasoning across extensive video collections. Existing benchmarks for video question answering remain limited in scope, typically involving one clip per query, which falls short of representing the challenges of large-scale, audiovisual retrieval and reasoning encountered in practical applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task named AVHaystacksQA, where the goal is to identify salient segments across different videos in response to a query and link them together to generate the most informative answer. To this end, we present AVHaystacks, an audio-visual benchmark comprising 3100 annotated QA pairs designed to assess the capabilities of LMMs in multi-video retrieval and temporal grounding task. Additionally, we propose a model-agnostic, multi-agent framework MAGNET to address this challenge, achieving up to 89% and 65% relative improvements over baseline methods on BLEU@4 and GPT evaluation scores in QA task on our proposed AVHaystacks. To enable robust evaluation of multi-video retrieval and temporal grounding for optimal response generation, we introduce two new metrics, STEM, which captures alignment errors between a ground truth and a predicted step sequence and MTGS, to facilitate balanced and interpretable evaluation of segment-level grounding performance.
Breaking the Gradient Barrier: Unveiling Large Language Models for Strategic Classification
Strategic classification (SC) explores how individuals or entities modify their features strategically to achieve favorable classification outcomes. However, existing SC methods, which are largely based on linear models or shallow neural networks, face significant limitations in terms of scalability and capacity when applied to realworld datasets with significantly increasing scale, especially in financial services and the internet sector. In this paper, we investigate how to leverage large language models to design a more scalable and efficient SC framework, especially in the case of growing individuals engaged with decision-making processes. Specifically, we introduce GLIM, a gradient-free SC method grounded in in-context learning. During the feed-forward process of self-attention, GLIM implicitly simulates the typical bi-level optimization process of SC, including both the feature manipulation and decision rule optimization. Without fine-tuning the LLMs, our proposed GLIM enjoys the advantage of cost-effective adaptation in dynamic strategic environments. Theoretically, we prove GLIM can support pre-trained LLMs to adapt to a broad range of strategic manipulations. We validate our approach through experiments with a collection of pre-trained LLMs on real-world and synthetic datasets in financial and internet domains, demonstrating that our GLIM exhibits both robustness and efficiency, and offering an effective solution for large-scale SC tasks.