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Efficient Variance-reduced Estimation from Generative EHR Models: The SCOPE and REACH Estimators

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Generative models trained using self-supervision of tokenized electronic health record (EHR) timelines show promise for clinical outcome prediction. This is typically done using Monte Carlo simulation for future patient trajectories. However, existing approaches suffer from three key limitations: sparse estimate distributions that poorly differentiate patient risk levels, extreme computational costs, and high sampling variance. We propose two new estimators: the Sum of Conditional Outcome Probability Estimator (SCOPE) and Risk Estimation from Anticipated Conditional Hazards (REACH), that leverage next-token probability distributions discarded by standard Monte Carlo. We prove both estimators are unbiased and that REACH guarantees variance reduction over Monte Carlo sampling for any model and outcome. Empirically, on hospital mortality prediction in MIMIC-IV using the ETHOS-ARES framework, SCOPE and REACH match 100-sample Monte Carlo performance using only 10-11 samples (95% CI: [9,11]), representing a ~10x reduction in inference cost without degrading calibration. For ICU admission prediction, efficiency gains are more modest (~1.2x), which we attribute to the outcome's lower "spontaneity," a property we characterize theoretically and empirically. These methods substantially improve the feasibility of deploying generative EHR models in resource-constrained clinical settings.


Score-based diffusion models for diffuse optical tomography with uncertainty quantification

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Score-based diffusion models are a recently developed framework for posterior sampling in Bayesian inverse problems with a state-of-the-art performance for severely ill-posed problems by leveraging a powerful prior distribution learned from empirical data. Despite generating significant interest especially in the machine-learning community, a thorough study of realistic inverse problems in the presence of modelling error and utilization of physical measurement data is still outstanding. In this work, the framework of unconditional representation for the conditional score function (UCoS) is evaluated for linearized difference imaging in diffuse optical tomography (DOT). DOT uses boundary measurements of near-infrared light to estimate the spatial distribution of absorption and scattering parameters in biological tissues. The problem is highly ill-posed and thus sensitive to noise and modelling errors. We introduce a novel regularization approach that prevents overfitting of the score function by constructing a mixed score composed of a learned and a model-based component. Validation of this approach is done using both simulated and experimental measurement data. The experiments demonstrate that a data-driven prior distribution results in posterior samples with low variance, compared to classical model-based estimation, and centred around the ground truth, even in the context of a highly ill-posed problem and in the presence of modelling errors.


Generator-based Graph Generation via Heat Diffusion

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Graph generative modelling has become an essential task due to the wide range of applications in chemistry, biology, social networks, and knowledge representation. In this work, we propose a novel framework for generating graphs by adapting the Generator Matching (arXiv:2410.20587) paradigm to graph-structured data. We leverage the graph Laplacian and its associated heat kernel to define a continous-time diffusion on each graph. The Laplacian serves as the infinitesimal generator of this diffusion, and its heat kernel provides a family of conditional perturbations of the initial graph. A neural network is trained to match this generator by minimising a Bregman divergence between the true generator and a learnable surrogate. Once trained, the surrogate generator is used to simulate a time-reversed diffusion process to sample new graph structures. Our framework unifies and generalises existing diffusion-based graph generative models, injecting domain-specific inductive bias via the Laplacian, while retaining the flexibility of neural approximators. Experimental studies demonstrate that our approach captures structural properties of real and synthetic graphs effectively.


Why Some Models Resist Unlearning: A Linear Stability Perspective

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Machine unlearning, the ability to erase the effect of specific training samples without retraining from scratch, is critical for privacy, regulation, and efficiency. However, most progress in unlearning has been empirical, with little theoretical understanding of when and why unlearning works. We tackle this gap by framing unlearning through the lens of asymptotic linear stability to capture the interaction between optimization dynamics and data geometry. The key quantity in our analysis is data coherence which is the cross sample alignment of loss surface directions near the optimum. We decompose coherence along three axes: within the retain set, within the forget set, and between them, and prove tight stability thresholds that separate convergence from divergence. To further link data properties to forgettability, we study a two layer ReLU CNN under a signal plus noise model and show that stronger memorization makes forgetting easier: when the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is lower, cross sample alignment is weaker, reducing coherence and making unlearning easier; conversely, high SNR, highly aligned models resist unlearning. For empirical verification, we show that Hessian tests and CNN heatmaps align closely with the predicted boundary, mapping the stability frontier of gradient based unlearning as a function of batching, mixing, and data/model alignment. Our analysis is grounded in random matrix theory tools and provides the first principled account of the trade offs between memorization, coherence, and unlearning.


Unified Inference Framework for Single and Multi-Player Performative Prediction: Method and Asymptotic Optimality

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Performative prediction characterizes environments where predictive models alter the very data distributions they aim to forecast, triggering complex feedback loops. While prior research treats single-agent and multi-agent performativity as distinct phenomena, this paper introduces a unified statistical inference framework that bridges these contexts, treating the former as a special case of the latter. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we put forward the Repeated Risk Minimization (RRM) procedure for estimating the performative stability, and establish a rigorous inferential theory for admitting its asymptotic normality and confirming its asymptotic efficiency. Second, for the performative optimality, we introduce a novel two-step plug-in estimator that integrates the idea of Recalibrated Prediction Powered Inference (RePPI) with Importance Sampling, and further provide formal derivations for the Central Limit Theorems of both the underlying distributional parameters and the plug-in results. The theoretical analysis demonstrates that our estimator achieves the semiparametric efficiency bound and maintains robustness under mild distributional misspecification. This work provides a principled toolkit for reliable estimation and decision-making in dynamic, performative environments.


Simulation-Based Inference via Regression Projection and Batched Discrepancies

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We analyze a lightweight simulation-based inference method that infers simulator parameters using only a regression-based projection of the observed data. After fitting a surrogate linear regression once, the procedure simulates small batches at the proposed parameter values and assigns kernel weights based on the resulting batch-residual discrepancy, producing a self-normalized pseudo-posterior that is simple, parallelizable, and requires access only to the fitted regression coefficients rather than raw observations. We formalize the construction as an importance-sampling approximation to a population target that averages over simulator randomness, prove consistency as the number of parameter draws grows, and establish stability in estimating the surrogate regression from finite samples. We then characterize the asymptotic concentration as the batch size increases and the bandwidth shrinks, showing that the pseudo-posterior concentrates on an identified set determined by the chosen projection, thereby clarifying when the method yields point versus set identification. Experiments on a tractable nonlinear model and on a cosmological calibration task using the DREAMS simulation suite illustrate the computational advantages of regression-based projections and the identifiability limitations arising from low-information summaries.


Universal One-third Time Scaling in Learning Peaked Distributions

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Training large language models (LLMs) is computationally expensive, partly because the loss exhibits slow power-law convergence whose origin remains debatable. Through systematic analysis of toy models and empirical evaluation of LLMs, we show that this behavior can arise intrinsically from the use of softmax and cross-entropy. When learning peaked probability distributions, e.g., next-token distributions, these components yield power-law vanishing losses and gradients, creating a fundamental optimization bottleneck. This ultimately leads to power-law time scaling of the loss with a universal exponent of $1/3$. Our results provide a mechanistic explanation for observed neural scaling and suggest new directions for improving LLM training efficiency.


Fubini Study geometry of representation drift in high dimensional data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

High dimensional representation drift is commonly quantified using Euclidean or cosine distances, which presuppose fixed coordinates when comparing representations across time, training or preprocessing stages. While effective in many settings, these measures entangle intrinsic changes in the data with variations induced by arbitrary parametrizations. We introduce a projective geometric view of representation drift grounded in the Fubini Study metric, which identifies representations that differ only by gauge transformations such as global rescalings or sign flips. Applying this framework to empirical high dimensional datasets, we explicitly construct representation trajectories and track their evolution through cumulative geometric drift. Comparing Euclidean, cosine and Fubini Study distances along these trajectories reveals that conventional metrics systematically overestimate change whenever representations carry genuine projective ambiguity. By contrast, the Fubini Study metric isolates intrinsic evolution by remaining invariant under gauge-induced fluctuations. We further show that the difference between cosine and Fubini Study drift defines a computable, monotone quantity that directly captures representation churn attributable to gauge freedom. This separation provides a diagnostic for distinguishing meaningful structural evolution from parametrization artifacts, without introducing model-specific assumptions. Overall, we establish a geometric criterion for assessing representation stability in high-dimensional systems and clarify the limits of angular distances. Embedding representation dynamics in projective space connects data analysis with established geometric programs and yields observables that are directly testable in empirical workflows.


Fast Sampling for Flows and Diffusions with Lazy and Point Mass Stochastic Interpolants

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Stochastic interpolants unify flows and diffusions, popular generative modeling frameworks. A primary hyperparameter in these methods is the interpolation schedule that determines how to bridge a standard Gaussian base measure to an arbitrary target measure. We prove how to convert a sample path of a stochastic differential equation (SDE) with arbitrary diffusion coefficient under any schedule into the unique sample path under another arbitrary schedule and diffusion coefficient. We then extend the stochastic interpolant framework to admit a larger class of point mass schedules in which the Gaussian base measure collapses to a point mass measure. Under the assumption of Gaussian data, we identify lazy schedule families that make the drift identically zero and show that with deterministic sampling one gets a variance-preserving schedule commonly used in diffusion models, whereas with statistically optimal SDE sampling one gets our point mass schedule. Finally, to demonstrate the usefulness of our theoretical results on realistic highly non-Gaussian data, we apply our lazy schedule conversion to a state-of-the-art pretrained flow model and show that this allows for generating images in fewer steps without retraining the model.


Online Conformal Prediction via Universal Portfolio Algorithms

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Online conformal prediction (OCP) seeks prediction intervals that achieve long-run $1-α$ coverage for arbitrary (possibly adversarial) data streams, while remaining as informative as possible. Existing OCP methods often require manual learning-rate tuning to work well, and may also require algorithm-specific analyses. Here, we develop a general regret-to-coverage theory for interval-valued OCP based on the $(1-α)$-pinball loss. Our first contribution is to identify \emph{linearized regret} as a key notion, showing that controlling it implies coverage bounds for any online algorithm. This relies on a black-box reduction that depends only on the Fenchel conjugate of an upper bound on the linearized regret. Building on this theory, we propose UP-OCP, a parameter-free method for OCP, via a reduction to a two-asset portfolio selection problem, leveraging universal portfolio algorithms. We show strong finite-time bounds on the miscoverage of UP-OCP, even for polynomially growing predictions. Extensive experiments support that UP-OCP delivers consistently better size/coverage trade-offs than prior online conformal baselines.