Law
Goal-Conditioned Predictive Coding for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of formulating decision making as supervised learning on offline-collected trajectories. Powerful sequence models, such as GPT or BERT, are often employed to encode the trajectories. However, the benefits of performing sequence modeling on trajectory data remain unclear. In this work, we investigate whether sequence modeling has the ability to condense trajectories into useful representations that enhance policy learning. We adopt a two-stage framework that first leverages sequence models to encode trajectory-level representations, and then learns a goal-conditioned policy employing the encoded representations as its input. This formulation allows us to consider many existing supervised offline RL methods as specific instances of our framework. Within this framework, we introduce Goal-Conditioned Predictive Coding (GCPC), a sequence modeling objective that yields powerful trajectory representations and leads to performant policies. Through extensive empirical evaluations on AntMaze, FrankaKitchen and Locomotion environments, we observe that sequence modeling can have a significant impact on challenging decision making tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that GCPC learns a goal-conditioned latent representation encoding the future trajectory, which enables competitive performance on all three benchmarks.
BayesPCN: A Continually Learnable Predictive Coding Associative Memory
Associative memory plays an important role in human intelligence and its mechanisms have been linked to attention in machine learning. While the machine learning community's interest in associative memories has recently been rekindled, most work has focused on memory recall ($read$) over memory learning ($write$). In this paper, we present BayesPCN, a hierarchical associative memory capable of performing continual one-shot memory writes without meta-learning. Moreover, BayesPCN is able to gradually forget past observations ($forget$) to free its memory. Experiments show that BayesPCN can recall corrupted i.i.d.
Improving Self-supervised Learning with Automated Unsupervised Outlier Arbitration
Our work reveals a structured shortcoming of the existing mainstream self-supervised learning methods. Whereas self-supervised learning frameworks usually take the prevailing perfect instance level invariance hypothesis for granted, we carefully investigate the pitfalls behind. Particularly, we argue that the existing augmentation pipeline for generating multiple positive views naturally introduces out-of-distribution (OOD) samples that undermine the learning of the downstream tasks. Generating diverse positive augmentations on the input does not always pay off in benefiting downstream tasks. To overcome this inherent deficiency, we introduce a lightweight latent variable model UOTA, targeting the view sampling issue for self-supervised learning. UOTA adaptively searches for the most important sampling region to produce views, and provides viable choice for outlier-robust self-supervised learning approaches.
GaussianMarker: Uncertainty-Aware Copyright Protection of 3D Gaussian Splatting
However, existing watermarking methods for meshes, point clouds, and implicit radiance fields cannot be directly applied to 3DGS models, as 3DGS models use explicit 3D Gaussians with distinct structures and do not rely on neural networks. Naively embedding the watermark on a pre-trained 3DGS can cause obvious distortion in rendered images. In our work, we propose an uncertainty-based method that constrains the perturbation of model parameters to achieve invisible watermarking for 3DGS.
DeepMed: Semiparametric Causal Mediation Analysis with Debiased Deep Learning
Causal mediation analysis can unpack the black box of causality and is therefore a powerful tool for disentangling causal pathways in biomedical and social sciences, and also for evaluating machine learning fairness. To reduce bias for estimating Natural Direct and Indirect Effects in mediation analysis, we propose a new method called DeepMed that uses deep neural networks (DNNs) to cross-fit the infinite-dimensional nuisance functions in the efficient influence functions. We obtain novel theoretical results that our DeepMed method (1) can achieve semiparametric efficiency bound without imposing sparsity constraints on the DNN architecture and (2) can adapt to certain low dimensional structures of the nuisance functions, significantly advancing the existing literature on DNN-based semiparametric causal inference. Extensive synthetic experiments are conducted to support our findings and also expose the gap between theory and practice. As a proof of concept, we apply DeepMed to analyze two real datasets on machine learning fairness and reach conclusions consistent with previous findings.
A Survey and Datasheet Repository of Publicly Available US Criminal Justice Datasets
Criminal justice is an increasingly important application domain for machine learning and algorithmic fairness, as predictive tools are becoming widely used in police, courts, and prison systems worldwide. A few relevant benchmarks have received significant attention, e.g., the COMPAS dataset, often without proper consideration of the domain context. To raise awareness of publicly available criminal justice datasets and encourage their responsible use, we conduct a survey, consider contexts, highlight potential uses, and identify gaps and limitations. We provide datasheets for 15 datasets and upload them to a public repository. We compare the datasets across several dimensions, including size, coverage of the population, and potential use, highlighting concerns. We hope that this work can provide a useful starting point for researchers looking for appropriate datasets related to criminal justice, and that the repository will continue to grow as a community effort.
Causal-driven attribution (CDA): Estimating channel influence without user-level data
Filippou, Georgios, Quach, Boi Mai, Lenghel, Diana, White, Arthur, Jha, Ashish Kumar
Attribution modelling lies at the heart of marketing effectiveness, yet most existing approaches depend on user-level path data, which are increasingly inaccessible due to privacy regulations and platform restrictions. This paper introduces a Causal-Driven Attribution (CDA) framework that infers channel influence using only aggregated impression-level data, avoiding any reliance on user identifiers or click-path tracking. CDA integrates temporal causal discovery (using PCMCI) with causal effect estimation via a Structural Causal Model to recover directional channel relationships and quantify their contributions to conversions. Using large-scale synthetic data designed to replicate real marketing dynamics, we show that CDA achieves an average relative RMSE of 9.50% when given the true causal graph, and 24.23% when using the predicted graph, demonstrating strong accuracy under correct structure and meaningful signal recovery even under structural uncertainty. CDA captures cross-channel interdependencies while providing interpretable, privacy-preserving attribution insights, offering a scalable and future-proof alternative to traditional path-based models.
LexEval: A Comprehensive Chinese Legal Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing tasks and demonstrate considerable potential in the legal domain. However, legal applications demand high standards of accuracy, reliability, and fairness. Applying existing LLMs to legal systems without careful evaluation of their potential and limitations could pose significant risks in legal practice.To this end, we introduce a standardized comprehensive Chinese legal benchmark LexEval.This benchmark is notable in the following three aspects: (1) Ability Modeling: We propose a new taxonomy of legal cognitive abilities to organize different tasks.
Predictive coding in balanced neural networks with noise, chaos and delays
Biological neural networks face a formidable task: performing reliable computations in the face of intrinsic stochasticity in individual neurons, imprecisely specified synaptic connectivity, and nonnegligible delays in synaptic transmission. A common approach to combatting such biological heterogeneity involves averaging over large redundant networks of N neurons resulting in coding errors that decrease classically as the square root of N. Recent work demonstrated a novel mechanism whereby recurrent spiking networks could efficiently encode dynamic stimuli achieving a superclassical scaling in which coding errors decrease as 1/N. This specific mechanism involved two key ideas: predictive coding, and a tight balance, or cancellation between strong feedforward inputs and strong recurrent feedback. However, the theoretical principles governing the efficacy of balanced predictive coding and its robustness to noise, synaptic weight heterogeneity and communication delays remain poorly understood. To discover such principles, we introduce an analytically tractable model of balanced predictive coding, in which the degree of balance and the degree of weight disorder can be dissociated unlike in previous balanced network models, and we develop a mean-field theory of coding accuracy. Overall, our work provides and solves a general theoretical framework for dissecting the differential contributions neural noise, synaptic disorder, chaos, synaptic delays, and balance to the fidelity of predictive neural codes, reveals the fundamental role that balance plays in achieving superclassical scaling, and unifies previously disparate models in theoretical neuroscience.