Density estimation is essential for generative modeling, particularly with the rise of modern neural networks. While existing methods capture complex data distributions, they often lack interpretability and uncertainty quantification. Bayesian nonparametric methods, especially the \polya tree, offer a robust framework that addresses these issues by accurately capturing function behavior over small intervals. Traditional techniques like Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) face high computational complexity and scalability limitations, hindering the use of Bayesian nonparametric methods in deep learning. To tackle this, we introduce the variational \polya tree (VPT) model, which employs stochastic variational inference to compute posterior distributions. This model provides a flexible, nonparametric Bayesian prior that captures latent densities and works well with stochastic gradient optimization. We also leverage the joint distribution likelihood for a more precise variational posterior approximation than traditional mean-field methods. We evaluate the model performance on both real data and images, and demonstrate its competitiveness with other state-of-the-art deep density estimation methods. We also explore its ability in enhancing interpretability and uncertainty quantification. Code is available at https://github.com/howardchanth/var-polya-tree.

Pre-trained large language models have demonstrated a strong ability to learn from context, known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite a surge of recent applications that leverage such capabilities, it is by no means clear, at least theoretically, how the ICL capabilities arise, and in particular, what is the precise role played by key factors such as pre-training procedure as well as context construction. In this work, we propose a new framework to analyze the ICL performance, for a class of realistic settings, which includes network architectures, data encoding, data generation, and prompt construction process. As a first step, we construct a simple example with a one-layer transformer, and show an interesting result, namely when the pre-train data distribution is different from the query task distribution, a properly constructed context can shift the output distribution towards the query task distribution, in a quantifiable manner, leading to accurate prediction on the query topic. We then extend the findings in the previous step to a more general case, and derive the precise relationship between ICL performance, context length and the KL divergence between pre-train and query task distribution. Finally, we provide experiments to validate our theoretical results.

Developing benchmark datasets for low-resource languages poses significant challenges, primarily due to the limited availability of native linguistic experts and the substantial time and cost involved in annotation. Given these challenges, Maithili is still underrepresented in natural language processing research. It is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by more than 13 million people in the Purvanchal region of India, valued for its rich linguistic structure and cultural significance. While sentiment analysis has achieved remarkable progress in high-resource languages, resources for low-resource languages, such as Maithili, remain scarce, often restricted to coarse-grained annotations and lacking interpretability mechanisms. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel dataset comprising 3,221 Maithili sentences annotated for sentiment polarity and accompanied by natural language justifications. Moreover, the dataset is carefully curated and validated by linguistic experts to ensure both label reliability and contextual fidelity. Notably, the justifications are written in Maithili, thereby promoting culturally grounded interpretation and enhancing the explainability of sentiment models. Furthermore, extensive experiments using both classical machine learning and state-of-the-art transformer architectures demonstrate the dataset's effectiveness for interpretable sentiment analysis. Ultimately, this work establishes the first benchmark for explainable affective computing in Maithili, thus contributing a valuable resource to the broader advancement of multilingual NLP and explainable AI.

Accurate rainfall forecasting, particularly for extreme events, remains a significant challenge in climatology and the Earth system. This paper presents novel physics-informed Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) combined with extreme-value analysis techniques to improve gauge-station rainfall predictions across Thailand. The model leverages a graph-structured representation of gauge stations to capture complex spatiotemporal patterns, and it offers explainability through teleconnections. We preprocess relevant climate indices that potentially influence regional rainfall. The proposed Graph Attention Network with Long Short-Term Memory (Attention-LSTM) applies the attention mechanism using initial edge features derived from simple orographic-precipitation physics formulation. The embeddings are subsequently processed by LSTM layers. To address extremes, we perform Peak-Over-Threshold (POT) mapping using the novel Spatial Season-aware Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD) method, which overcomes limitations of traditional machine-learning models. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms well-established baselines across most regions, including areas prone to extremes, and remains strongly competitive with the state of the art. Compared with the operational forecasting system SEAS5, our real-world application improves extreme-event prediction and offers a practical enhancement to produce high-resolution maps that support decision-making in long-term water management.

When some parameters of a constrained optimization problem (COP) are uncertain, this gives rise to a predict-then-optimize (PtO) problem, comprising two stages: the prediction of the unknown parameters from contextual information and the subsequent optimization using those predicted parameters. Decision-focused learning (DFL) implements the first stage by training a machine learning (ML) model to optimize the quality of the decisions made using the predicted parameters. When the predicted parameters occur in the constraints, they can lead to infeasible solutions. Therefore, it is important to simultaneously manage both feasibility and decision quality. We develop a DFL framework for predicting constraint parameters in a generic COP. While prior works typically assume that the underlying optimization problem is a linear program (LP) or integer LP (ILP), our approach makes no such assumption. We derive two novel loss functions based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE): the first one penalizes infeasibility (by penalizing predicted parameters that lead to infeasible solutions), while the second one penalizes suboptimal decisions (by penalizing predicted parameters that make the true optimal solution infeasible). We introduce a single tunable parameter to form a weighted average of the two losses, allowing decision-makers to balance suboptimality and feasibility. We experimentally demonstrate that adjusting this parameter provides decision-makers control over this trade-off. Moreover, across several COP instances, we show that adjusting the tunable parameter allows a decision-maker to prioritize either suboptimality or feasibility, outperforming the performance of existing baselines in either objective.

Contemporary theories model language processing as integrating both top-down expectations and bottom-up inputs. One major prediction of such models is that the quality of the bottom-up inputs modulates ease of processing -- noisy inputs should lead to difficult and effortful comprehension. We test this prediction in the domain of reading. First, we propose an information-theoretic operationalization for the "quality" of bottom-up information as the mutual information (MI) between visual information and word identity. We formalize this prediction in a mathematical model of reading as a Bayesian update. Second, we test our operationalization by comparing participants' reading times in conditions where words' information quality has been reduced, either by occluding their top or bottom half, with full words. We collect data in English and Chinese. We then use multimodal language models to estimate the mutual information between visual inputs and words. We use these data to estimate the specific effect of reduced information quality on reading times. Finally, we compare how information is distributed across visual forms. In English and Chinese, the upper half contains more information about word identity than the lower half. However, the asymmetry is more pronounced in English, a pattern which is reflected in the reading times.

Ordering-based approaches to causal discovery identify topological orders of causal graphs, providing scalable alternatives to combinatorial search methods. Under the Additive Noise Model (ANM) assumption, recent causal ordering methods based on score matching require an accurate estimation of the Hessian diagonal of the log-densities. In this paper, we aim to improve the approximation of the Hessian diagonal of the log-densities, thereby enhancing the performance of ordering-based causal discovery algorithms. Existing approaches that rely on Stein gradient estimators are computationally expensive and memory-intensive, while diffusion-model-based methods remain unstable due to the second-order derivatives of score models. To alleviate these problems, we propose Score-informed Neural Operator (SciNO), a probabilistic generative model in smooth function spaces designed to stably approximate the Hessian diagonal and to preserve structural information during the score modeling. Empirical results show that SciNO reduces order divergence by 42.7% on synthetic graphs and by 31.5% on real-world datasets on average compared to DiffAN, while maintaining memory efficiency and scalability. Furthermore, we propose a probabilistic control algorithm for causal reasoning with autoregressive models that integrates SciNO's probability estimates with autoregressive model priors, enabling reliable data-driven causal ordering informed by semantic information. Consequently, the proposed method enhances causal reasoning abilities of LLMs without additional fine-tuning or prompt engineering.

We study in-context learning problems where a Transformer is pretrained on tasks drawn from a mixture distribution $π=\sum_{α\in\mathcal{A}} λ_α π_α$, called the pretraining prior, in which each mixture component $π_α$ is a distribution on tasks of a specific difficulty level indexed by $α$. Our goal is to understand the performance of the pretrained Transformer when evaluated on a different test distribution $μ$, consisting of tasks of fixed difficulty $β\in\mathcal{A}$, and with potential distribution shift relative to $π_β$, subject to the chi-squared divergence $χ^2(μ,π_β)$ being at most $κ$. In particular, we consider nonparametric regression problems with random smoothness, and multi-index models with random smoothness as well as random effective dimension. We prove that a large Transformer pretrained on sufficient data achieves the optimal rate of convergence corresponding to the difficulty level $β$, uniformly over test distributions $μ$ in the chi-squared divergence ball. Thus, the pretrained Transformer is able to achieve faster rates of convergence on easier tasks and is robust to distribution shift at test time. Finally, we prove that even if an estimator had access to the test distribution $μ$, the convergence rate of its expected risk over $μ$ could not be faster than that of our pretrained Transformers, thereby providing a more appropriate optimality guarantee than minimax lower bounds.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) enables the study of cellular heterogeneity. Y et, clustering accuracy, and with it downstream analyses based on cell labels, remain challenging due to measurement noise and biological variability. In standard latent spaces (e.g., obtained through PCA), data from different cell types can be projected close together, making accurate clustering difficult. We introduce a latent plug-and-play diffusion framework that separates the observation and de-noising space. This separation is operationalized through a novel Gibbs sampling procedure: the learned diffusion prior is applied in a low-dimensional latent space to perform denoising, while to steer this process, noise is reintroduced into the original high-dimensional observation space. This unique "input-space steering" ensures the denoising trajectory remains faithful to the original data structure. Our approach offers three key advantages: (1) adaptive noise handling via a tunable balance between prior and observed data; (2) uncertainty quantification through principled uncertainty estimates for downstream analysis; and (3) generalizable denoising by leveraging clean reference data to denoise noisier datasets, and via averaging, improve quality beyond the training set. We evaluate robustness on both synthetic and real single-cell genomics data. Our method improves clustering accuracy on synthetic data across varied noise levels and dataset shifts. On real-world single-cell data, our method demonstrates improved biological coherence in the resulting cell clusters, with cluster boundaries that better align with known cell type markers and developmental trajectories. Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has revolutionized biomedical research by enabling high-resolution profiling of cellular heterogeneity (Park et al., 2020; Miragaia et al., 2019), with large-scale initiatives like the Human Cell Atlas providing foundational references for cell type annotation (Regev et al., 2017; Lindeboom et al., 2021; Elmentaite et al., 2022; Stuart et al., 2019; Lopez et al., 2018).

Decomposing prediction uncertainty into its aleatoric (irreducible) and epistemic (reducible) components is critical for the development and deployment of machine learning systems. A popular, principled measure for epistemic uncertainty is the mutual information between the response variable and model parameters. However, evaluating this measure requires access to the posterior distribution of the model parameters, which is challenging to compute. In view of this, we introduce a frequentist measure of epistemic uncertainty based on the bootstrap. Our main theoretical contribution is a novel asymptotic expansion that reveals that our proposed (frequentist) measure and the (Bayesian) mutual information are asymptotically equivalent. This provides frequentist interpretations to mutual information and new computational strategies for approximating it. Moreover, we link our proposed approach to the widely-used heuristic approach of deep ensembles, giving added perspective on their practical success.