Industry
Auto-differentiable data assimilation: Co-learning of states, dynamics, and filtering algorithms
Adrian, Melissa, Sanz-Alonso, Daniel, Willett, Rebecca
Data assimilation algorithms estimate the state of a dynamical system from partial observations, where the successful performance of these algorithms hinges on costly parameter tuning and on employing an accurate model for the dynamics. This paper introduces a framework for jointly learning the state, dynamics, and parameters of filtering algorithms in data assimilation through a process we refer to as auto-differentiable filtering. The framework leverages a theoretically motivated loss function that enables learning from partial, noisy observations via gradient-based optimization using auto-differentiation. We further demonstrate how several well-known data assimilation methods can be learned or tuned within this framework. To underscore the versatility of auto-differentiable filtering, we perform experiments on dynamical systems spanning multiple scientific domains, such as the Clohessy-Wiltshire equations from aerospace engineering, the Lorenz-96 system from atmospheric science, and the generalized Lotka-Volterra equations from systems biology. Finally, we provide guidelines for practitioners to customize our framework according to their observation model, accuracy requirements, and computational budget.
CoNBONet: Conformalized Neuroscience-inspired Bayesian Operator Network for Reliability Analysis
Garg, Shailesh, Chakraborty, Souvik
Time-dependent reliability analysis of nonlinear dynamical systems under stochastic excitations is a critical yet computationally demanding task. Conventional approaches, such as Monte Carlo simulation, necessitate repeated evaluations of computationally expensive numerical solvers, leading to significant computational bottlenecks. To address this challenge, we propose \textit{CoNBONet}, a neuroscience-inspired surrogate model that enables fast, energy-efficient, and uncertainty-aware reliability analysis, providing a scalable alternative to techniques such as Monte Carlo simulations. CoNBONet, short for \textbf{Co}nformalized \textbf{N}euroscience-inspired \textbf{B}ayesian \textbf{O}perator \textbf{Net}work, leverages the expressive power of deep operator networks while integrating neuroscience-inspired neuron models to achieve fast, low-power inference. Unlike traditional surrogates such as Gaussian processes, polynomial chaos expansions, or support vector regression, that may face scalability challenges for high-dimensional, time-dependent reliability problems, CoNBONet offers \textit{fast and energy-efficient inference} enabled by a neuroscience-inspired network architecture, \textit{calibrated uncertainty quantification with theoretical guarantees} via split conformal prediction, and \textit{strong generalization capability} through an operator-learning paradigm that maps input functions to system response trajectories. Validation of the proposed CoNBONet for various nonlinear dynamical systems demonstrates that CoNBONet preserves predictive fidelity, and achieves reliable coverage of failure probabilities, making it a powerful tool for robust and scalable reliability analysis in engineering design.
A Generalised Exponentiated Gradient Approach to Enhance Fairness in Binary and Multi-class Classification Tasks
Boubekraoui, Maryam, d'Aloisio, Giordano, Di Marco, Antinisca
The widespread use of AI and ML models in sensitive areas raises significant concerns about fairness. While the research community has introduced various methods for bias mitigation in binary classification tasks, the issue remains under-explored in multi-class classification settings. To address this limitation, in this paper, we first formulate the problem of fair learning in multi-class classification as a multi-objective problem between effectiveness (i.e., prediction correctness) and multiple linear fairness constraints. Next, we propose a Generalised Exponentiated Gradient (GEG) algorithm to solve this task. GEG is an in-processing algorithm that enhances fairness in binary and multi-class classification settings under multiple fairness definitions. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of GEG against six baselines across seven multi-class and three binary datasets, using four widely adopted effectiveness metrics and three fairness definitions. GEG overcomes existing baselines, with fairness improvements up to 92% and a decrease in accuracy up to 14%.
Scaling DoRA: High-Rank Adaptation via Factored Norms and Fused Kernels
Zelenin, Alexandra, Zhuravlyova, Alexandra
Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (DoRA) extends LoRA by decoupling weight magnitude from direction, but its forward pass requires the row-wise norm of W + sBA, a computation that every major framework we surveyed implements by materializing the dense [d_out, d_in] product BA. At d_in = 8192 and rank r = 384, a single module's norm requires about 512 MB of transient working memory in bf16, making high-rank DoRA costly and often infeasible on common single-GPU setups once hundreds of adapted modules and checkpointing are involved. We present two systems contributions. A factored norm decomposes the squared norm into base, cross, and Gram terms computable through O(d_out r + r^2) intermediates, eliminating the dense product. Fused Triton kernels collapse the four-kernel DoRA composition into a single pass, reducing memory traffic by about 4x and using a numerically stable form that avoids catastrophic cancellation in the near-unity rescaling regime where magnitude scales concentrate in practice. Across six 8-32B vision-language models (VLMs) on three NVIDIA GPUs (RTX 6000 PRO, H200, B200) at r = 384 in bf16, the fused implementation is 1.5-2.0x faster than Hugging Face PEFT's DoRA implementation for inference and 1.5-1.9x faster for gradient computation (optimizer step excluded), with up to 7 GB lower peak VRAM. Microbenchmarks on six GPUs spanning four architecture generations (L40S, A100, RTX 6000 PRO, H200, B200, B300) confirm 1.5-2.7x compose-kernel speedup. Final-logit cosine similarity exceeds 0.9999 across all model/GPU pairs, and multi-seed training curves match within 7.1 x 10^-4 mean per-step loss delta over 2000 steps.
Generalized Discrete Diffusion from Snapshots
Zekri, Oussama, Uscidda, Théo, Boullé, Nicolas, Korba, Anna
We introduce Generalized Discrete Diffusion from Snapshots (GDDS), a unified framework for discrete diffusion modeling that supports arbitrary noising processes over large discrete state spaces. Our formulation encompasses all existing discrete diffusion approaches, while allowing significantly greater flexibility in the choice of corruption dynamics. The forward noising process relies on uniformization and enables fast arbitrary corruption. For the reverse process, we derive a simple evidence lower bound (ELBO) based on snapshot latents, instead of the entire noising path, that allows efficient training of standard generative modeling architectures with clear probabilistic interpretation. Our experiments on large-vocabulary discrete generation tasks suggest that the proposed framework outperforms existing discrete diffusion methods in terms of training efficiency and generation quality, and beats autoregressive models for the first time at this scale. We provide the code along with a blog post on the project page : \href{https://oussamazekri.fr/gdds}{https://oussamazekri.fr/gdds}.
Rule-State Inference (RSI): A Bayesian Framework for Compliance Monitoring in Rule-Governed Domains
Existing machine learning frameworks for compliance monitoring -- Markov Logic Networks, Probabilistic Soft Logic, supervised models -- share a fundamental paradigm: they treat observed data as ground truth and attempt to approximate rules from it. This assumption breaks down in rule-governed domains such as taxation or regulatory compliance, where authoritative rules are known a priori and the true challenge is to infer the latent state of rule activation, compliance, and parametric drift from partial and noisy observations. We propose Rule-State Inference (RSI), a Bayesian framework that inverts this paradigm by encoding regulatory rules as structured priors and casting compliance monitoring as posterior inference over a latent rule-state space S = {(a_i, c_i, delta_i)}, where a_i captures rule activation, c_i models the compliance rate, and delta_i quantifies parametric drift. We prove three theoretical guarantees: (T1) RSI absorbs regulatory changes in O(1) time via a prior ratio correction, independently of dataset size; (T2) the posterior is Bernstein-von Mises consistent, converging to the true rule state as observations accumulate; (T3) mean-field variational inference monotonically maximizes the Evidence Lower BOund (ELBO). We instantiate RSI on the Togolese fiscal system and introduce RSI-Togo-Fiscal-Synthetic v1.0, a benchmark of 2,000 synthetic enterprises grounded in real OTR regulatory rules (2022-2025). Without any labeled training data, RSI achieves F1=0.519 and AUC=0.599, while absorbing regulatory changes in under 1ms versus 683-1082ms for full model retraining -- at least a 600x speedup.
Accelerate Vector Diffusion Maps by Landmarks
Yeh, Sing-Yuan, Wu, Yi-An, Wu, Hau-Tieng, Tsui, Mao-Pei
We propose a landmark-constrained algorithm, LA-VDM (Landmark Accelerated Vector Diffusion Maps), to accelerate the Vector Diffusion Maps (VDM) framework built upon the Graph Connection Laplacian (GCL), which captures pairwise connection relationships within complex datasets. LA-VDM introduces a novel two-stage normalization that effectively address nonuniform sampling densities in both the data and the landmark sets. Under a manifold model with the frame bundle structure, we show that we can accurately recover the parallel transport with landmark-constrained diffusion from a point cloud, and hence asymptotically LA-VDM converges to the connection Laplacian. The performance and accuracy of LA-VDM are demonstrated through experiments on simulated datasets and an application to nonlocal image denoising.
Active Inference for Physical AI Agents -- An Engineering Perspective
Physical AI agents, such as robots and other embodied systems operating under tight and fluctuating resource constraints, remain far less capable than biological agents in open-ended real-world environments. This paper argues that Active Inference (AIF), grounded in the Free Energy Principle, offers a principled foundation for closing that gap. We develop this argument from first principles, following a chain from probability theory through Bayesian machine learning and variational inference to active inference and reactive message passing. From the FEP perspective, systems that maintain their structural and functional integrity over time can, under suitable assumptions, be described as minimizing variational free energy (VFE), and AIF operationalizes this by unifying perception, learning, planning, and control within a single computational objective. We show that VFE minimization is naturally realized by reactive message passing on factor graphs, where inference emerges from local, parallel computations. This realization is well matched to the constraints of physical operation, including hard deadlines, asynchronous data, fluctuating power budgets, and changing environments. Because reactive message passing is event-driven, interruptible, and locally adaptable, performance degrades gracefully under reduced resources while model structure can adjust online. We further show that, under suitable coupling and coarse-graining conditions, coupled AIF agents can be described as higher-level AIF agents, yielding a homogeneous architecture based on the same message-passing primitive across scales. Our contribution is not empirical benchmarking, but a clear theoretical and architectural case for the engineering community.
Integrative Learning of Dynamically Evolving Multiplex Graphs and Nodal Attributes Using Neural Network Gaussian Processes with an Application to Dynamic Terrorism Graphs
Rodriguez-Acosta, Jose, Guha, Sharmistha, Patel, Lekha, Shuler, Kurtis
Exploring the dynamic co-evolution of multiplex graphs and nodal attributes is a compelling question in criminal and terrorism networks. This article is motivated by the study of dynamically evolving interactions among prominent terrorist organizations, considering various organizational attributes like size, ideology, leadership, and operational capacity. Statistically principled integration of multiplex graphs with nodal attributes is significantly challenging due to the need to leverage shared information within and across layers, account for uncertainty in predicting unobserved links, and capture temporal evolution of node attributes. These difficulties increase when layers are partially observed, as in terrorism networks where connections are deliberately hidden to obscure key relationships. To address these challenges, we present a principled methodological framework to integrate the multiplex graph layers and nodal attributes. The approach employs time-varying stochastic latent factor models, leveraging shared latent factors to capture graph structure and its co-evolution with node attributes. Latent factors are modeled using Gaussian processes with an infinitely wide deep neural network-based covariance function, termed neural network Gaussian processes (NN-GP). The NN-GP framework on latent factors exploits the predictive power of Bayesian deep neural network architecture while propagating uncertainty for reliability. Simulation studies highlight superior performance of the proposed approach in achieving inferential objectives. The approach, termed as dynamic joint learner, enables predictive inference (with uncertainty) of diverse unobserved dynamic relationships among prominent terrorist organizations and their organization-specific attributes, as well as clustering behavior in terms of friend-and-foe relationships, which could be informative in counter-terrorism research.
Adaptive Smoothed Online Multi-Task Learning
Keerthiram Murugesan, Hanxiao Liu, Jaime Carbonell, Yiming Yang
This paper addresses the challenge of jointly learning both the per-task model parameters and the inter-task relationships in a multi-task online learning setting. The proposed algorithm features probabilistic interpretation, efficient updating rules and flexible modulation on whether learners focus on their specific task or on jointly address all tasks. The paper also proves a sub-linear regret bound as compared to the best linear predictor in hindsight. Experiments over three multitask learning benchmark datasets show advantageous performance of the proposed approach over several state-of-the-art online multi-task learning baselines.