Directed Networks
Conformal Risk-Averse Decision Making with Action Conditional Guarantee
Zhu, Zihan, Kiyani, Shayan, Pappas, George, Hassani, Hamed
Reliable decision making pipelines powered by machine learning models require uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods that come with explicit safety guarantees. Conformal prediction provides such UQ by wrapping ML predictions into prediction sets, and recent work by Kiyani et al. (2025b) established that these sets can be translated into optimal risk-averse decision policies -- yet only inheriting marginal safety guarantees. We generalize and strengthen their results by (i) introducing action-conditional conformal prediction, which yields safety guarantees conditioned explicitly on each action taken by the decision maker, (ii) showing that action-conditional prediction sets serve as a proxy for the feasible decision space for risk-averse decision makers aiming to optimize action-conditional value-at-risk, and (iii) proposing a principled finite-sample algorithm based on pinball-loss minimization, connecting the framework of Gibbs et al. (2025) to action-conditional guarantees. Experiments on two real-world datasets confirm that our approach significantly improves action-conditional performance over conformal baselines.
The Quotient Bayesian Learning Rule
This paper introduces the Quotient Bayesian Learning Rule, an extension of natural-gradient Bayesian updates to probability models that fall outside the exponential family. Building on the observation that many heavy-tailed and otherwise non-exponential distributions arise as marginals of minimal exponential families, we prove that such marginals inherit a unique Fisher-Rao information geometry via the quotient-manifold construction. Exploiting this geometry, we derive the Quotient Natural Gradient algorithm, which takes steepest-descent steps in the well-structured covering space, thereby guaranteeing parameterization-invariant optimization in the target space. Empirical results on the Student-$t$ distribution confirm that our method converges more rapidly and attains higher-quality solutions than previous variants of the Bayesian Learning Rule.
Human-AI Teaming Through the Lens of Calibration
Nalisnick, Eric, Zhang, Chi, Qian, Sophia, Wang, Yixin
We study models for human-AI teaming through the lens of statistical calibration. We assume the team consists of an AI model and human -- both of which are calibrated with respect to some partitioning of the feature space -- and expose how the calibration assumptions propagate into the teaming framework. In particular, we consider frameworks that either (i) combine human and model predictions or (ii) delegate prediction responsibility to either a human or model. We show via theoretical and empirical results that existing methods for combination do not preserve the human's degree of calibration. Methods for delegation (by the very act of delegation) preserve calibration of the downstream predictors but shift the burden onto the rejector meta-model that decides who predicts. The rejector must be calibrated finely enough to locate where each member is superior, a demand that grows with the human's expertise and becomes unattainable when the human relies on information the system cannot observe.
Near-Exponential Convergence Rates for kNN Classification based on Boltzmann Margin
Yang, Luyuan, Shafaei, Shayan, Lan, Chao
Convergence-rate analysis for classifiers is often conducted under either Tsybakov margin or Massart margin. The former is a relatively weak condition that typically yields polynomial rates, while the latter is substantially stronger but can guarantee exponential rates. In this paper, we introduce a new condition, called Boltzmann margin, that bridges the gap between these two regimes. It is weaker than Massart margin, generally stronger than Tsybakov margin, and can imply many of their properties under suitable conditions. We apply Boltzmann Figure 1: Example data densities on [0,1] that satisfy different margins respectively. Bayes decision boundary is 0.5.margin to the analysis of kNN classifiers and establish the first near-exponential convergence rates for kNN classification. We also present extensions of the main results and provide numerical evidencenecessarily strong for many problems. Can there be a more supporting the main theoretical implications.
How Deep Are Deep GPs, Really? A Sharp Threshold and a Non-Gaussian Limit for Compositional GPs
Compositional priors describe the generic properties of layered functions in deep Bayesian models, where deep neural networks with random weights are a canonical example.In the wide-network limit, the prior is a Gaussian process with a depth-dependent kernel, and its behaviour as depth grows has been extensively studied through this kernel. Here, we study another case, where each layer itself is a vector valued Gaussian process, and our aim is similarly to understand the limiting behaviour of the prior as depth grows. Previous GP work has established that for the RBF kernel and a certain range of bandwidths $r$, the prior degenerates in the limit, converging to the set of constant functions -- which is not useful as a probabilistic model. In this paper we establish several new results. First, we identify a sharp bandwidth threshold $r_c(d) = ฮ(\sqrt{d})$ above which the limit is degenerate, strengthening the earlier bounds. Second, and more importantly, we show that for $r$ below the threshold $r_c(d)$ the prior converges to a limit distribution $ฯ_{\bar{Z}}$. We also prove that these distributions are non-degenerate and non-Gaussian, with non-vanishing dependence between coordinates. In contrast to the previously known degenerate regime, deep Gaussian process priors can therefore admit non-trivial limits. Empirically, we verify the threshold across a range of dimensions $d$, and demonstrate a complex multimodal behaviour of the limit distributions $ฯ_{\bar{Z}}$ -- a regime that becomes increasingly narrow with $d$ and would be hard to identify without knowing the threshold.
Nonparametric undirected graphical model selection using diffusion models
Kwon, Hyeok Kyu, Kang, Myeonggu, Chae, Minwoo, Wang, Wanjie
Undirected graphical models provide a fundamental framework for representing conditional independence structures among high-dimensional random variables. While undirected graphical model selection has become a central problem in high-dimensional statistics, most existing methods are restricted to parametric settings. In this paper, we develop a nonparametric approach to undirected graphical model selection based on diffusion models. Recent work has shown that diffusion models can adapt to the unknown graph structure of the underlying distribution, yet utilizing these models for explicit graph estimation remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel diffusion-based method for nonparametric undirected graphical model selection. We establish the model selection consistency of the proposed method and demonstrate its empirical performance through extensive simulations and two real data analyses.
Estimate Collapsibility of Causal Effects in Completed Partial DAGs via Strong d-Convex Hulls
Deng, Yuxin, Sun, Yi, Li, Zhiming, Liu, Huaxiong
This paper proposes a collapsible method for estimating causal effects that maintains the estimator's consistency before and after marginalization over some variables in completed partially directed acyclic graphs (CPDAGs). We first introduce the estimate collapsibility for CPDAGs and characterize the minimal collapsible sets as strong d-convex hulls. An efficient algorithm is devised to obtain such sets in DAGs and is generalized to CPDAGs. Then, we combine the graph reduction procedure with the IDA framework.
Environment-Robust Representation Learning with Empirical Bayes
Slavutsky, Yuli, Shen, Matthew, Wu, Bohan, Blei, David M.
We consider multi-environment prediction problems. We assume the environments change the distribution of a latent variable, while the mechanisms generating observed covariates and targets remain stable conditional on that variable. For example, hospitals or clinical cohorts may differ in the prevalence of latent patient states, even though the relationships between those states, physiological measurements, and outcomes remain unchanged. Given a dataset from multiple environments, we formulate a Bayesian model for such problems and derive the corresponding variational objective. We show that this objective decomposes into per-environment terms and an additional cross-environment balancing term induced by the model's structure. We use an empirical Bayes method to set the prior and incorporate it into the objective. Based on this objective, we develop an amortized variational algorithm for posterior approximation, and use the resulting learned latent variables to form predictions in new environments. We study our approach through simulations and real-world studies of astronomical source identification, microbiome-based disease detection, and ICU sepsis prediction. Across these settings, our method outperforms previous approaches for prediction in new environments.
PAC-Bayesian Adversarially Robust Generalization for Message Passing Graph Neural Networks: A Sensitivity Analysis
Liang, Ziling, Yi, Xinping, Wen, Qingsong, Jin, Shi
Whilst the vulnerability of graph neural networks (GNNs) to adversarial attacks poses a critical threat to graph representation learning, the understanding of the robust generalization behavior remains a fundamental challenge in the adversarial setting. Recently, PAC-Bayesian margin-based generalization analysis substantially advances this line of research by providing a flexible and data-dependent analytical framework. However, existing robust analyses often rely on isotropic Gaussian posteriors and control weight perturbations in the full parameter space, which limits the ability to capture heterogeneous parameter sensitivity yet hinges on hidden-width-dependent complexity terms, resulting in not-tight-enough generalization bounds. In this paper, we extend a recently proposed sensitivity-aware PAC-Bayesian framework from deep neural networks to message passing GNNs (MPGNNs) and derive a tighter robust generalization bound in the adversarial setting. Specifically, we first quantify how sensitive the perturbations across different parameter blocks are to the network outputs by deriving the output Jacobians with respect to the weight parameters. Exploiting the fact that these Jacobian matrices have rank at most $K$ in $K$-class graph classification, we then construct Jacobian-aligned sensitivity matrices and use anisotropic Gaussian posteriors with optimized covariances to upper bound the KL divergence in a tight way. Notably, by refining the spectral-norm dependence on the learned weights and reducing the leading dimension factor from hidden-width-dependent terms to the number of classes $K$, our analysis yields much tighter robust generalization guarantees for MPGNNs, thereby guiding their designs to enhance adversarial robustness.
Causal Atlases from Entropic Inference: Bayesian Networks beyond Optimal DAGs
Aliahmadi, Hazhir, Babayan, Irina, van Anders, Greg
Data-driven causal relationship identification is pertinent to advancing understanding of complex systems both within and beyond science. Bayesian networks offer a probabilistic method for modelling generic causal relationships via directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). However, typical techniques for constructing Bayesian networks rely on optimization, which can be ill-suited for learning causal relationships because the underlying data may admit multiple chains of causation. More data-faithful representations of causal relationships would provide frameworks for constructing multiple causal maps that are consistent with the variability that is inherent in underlying data. Here, we show that entropy-based inference generates atlases of plausible causal relationships that are consistent with underlying data. On simulated noisy data of 2- and 20-node linear structural equation models, we sample a maximum-entropy ensemble of graphs that allow us to quantify the inherent structural ambiguity in underlying causal relationships. Our method shows that "optimized" DAGs can contain causal artifacts are not consistent across equivalently accurate topologies.