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Privacy Auditing Synthetic Data Release through Local Likelihood Attacks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Auditing the privacy leakage of synthetic data is an important but unresolved problem. Most existing privacy auditing frameworks for synthetic data rely on heuristics and unreasonable assumptions to attack the failure modes of generative models, exhibiting limited capability to describe and detect the privacy exposure of training data through synthetic data release. In this paper, we study designing Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) that specifically exploit the observation that tabular generative models tend to significantly overfit to certain regions of the training distribution. Here, we propose Generative Likelihood Ratio Attack (Gen-LRA), a novel, computationally efficient No-Box MIA that, with no assumption of model knowledge or access, formulates its attack by evaluating the influence a test observation has in a surrogate model's estimation of a local likelihood ratio over the synthetic data. Assessed over a comprehensive benchmark spanning diverse datasets, model architectures, and attack parameters, we find that Gen-LRA consistently dominates other MIAs for generative models across multiple performance metrics. These results underscore Gen-LRA's effectiveness as a privacy auditing tool for the release of synthetic data, highlighting the significant privacy risks posed by generative model overfitting in real-world applications.


BED-LLM: Intelligent Information Gathering with LLMs and Bayesian Experimental Design

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We propose a general-purpose approach for improving the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to intelligently and adaptively gather information from a user or other external source using the framework of sequential Bayesian experimental design (BED). This enables LLMs to act as effective multi-turn conversational agents and interactively interface with external environments. Our approach, which we call BED-LLM (Bayesian Experimental Design with Large Language Models), is based on iteratively choosing questions or queries that maximize the expected information gain (EIG) about the task of interest given the responses gathered previously. We show how this EIG can be formulated in a principled way using a probabilistic model derived from the LLM's belief distribution and provide detailed insights into key decisions in its construction. Further key to the success of BED-LLM are a number of specific innovations, such as a carefully designed estimator for the EIG, not solely relying on in-context updates for conditioning on previous responses, and a targeted strategy for proposing candidate queries. We find that BED-LLM achieves substantial gains in performance across a wide range of tests based on the 20-questions game and using the LLM to actively infer user preferences, compared to direct prompting of the LLM and other adaptive design strategies.


Orientability of Causal Relations in Time Series using Summary Causal Graphs and Faithful Distributions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Understanding causal relations between temporal variables is a central challenge in time series analysis, particularly when the full causal structure is unknown. Even when the full causal structure cannot be fully specified, experts often succeed in providing a high-level abstraction of the causal graph, known as a summary causal graph, which captures the main causal relations between different time series while abstracting away micro-level details. In this work, we present conditions that guarantee the orientability of micro-level edges between temporal variables given the background knowledge encoded in a summary causal graph and assuming having access to a faithful and causally sufficient distribution with respect to the true unknown graph. Our results provide theoretical guarantees for edge orientation at the micro-level, even in the presence of cycles or bidirected edges at the macro-level. These findings offer practical guidance for leveraging SCGs to inform causal discovery in complex temporal systems and highlight the value of incorporating expert knowledge to improve causal inference from observational time series data.


Priors Matter: Addressing Misspecification in Bayesian Deep Q-Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Uncertainty quantification in reinforcement learning can greatly improve exploration and robustness. Approximate Bayesian approaches have recently been popularized to quantify uncertainty in model-free algorithms. However, so far the focus has been on improving the accuracy of the posterior approximation, instead of studying the accuracy of the prior and likelihood assumptions underlying the posterior. In this work, we demonstrate that there is a cold posterior effect in Bayesian deep Q-learning, where contrary to theory, performance increases when reducing the temperature of the posterior. To identify and overcome likely causes, we challenge common assumptions made on the likelihood and priors in Bayesian model-free algorithms. We empirically study prior distributions and show through statistical tests that the common Gaussian likelihood assumption is frequently violated. We argue that developing more suitable likelihoods and priors should be a key focus in future Bayesian reinforcement learning research and we offer simple, implementable solutions for better priors in deep Q-learning that lead to more performant Bayesian algorithms.


Controllable 3D Molecular Generation for Structure-Based Drug Design Through Bayesian Flow Networks and Gradient Integration

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advances in Structure-based Drug Design (SBDD) have leveraged generative models for 3D molecular generation, predominantly evaluating model performance by binding affinity to target proteins. However, practical drug discovery necessitates high binding affinity along with synthetic feasibility and selectivity, critical properties that were largely neglected in previous evaluations. To address this gap, we identify fundamental limitations of conventional diffusion-based generative models in effectively guiding molecule generation toward these diverse pharmacological properties. We propose CByG, a novel framework extending Bayesian Flow Network into a gradient-based conditional generative model that robustly integrates property-specific guidance. Additionally, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation scheme incorporating practical benchmarks for binding affinity, synthetic feasibility, and selectivity, overcoming the limitations of conventional evaluation methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed CByG framework significantly outperforms baseline models across multiple essential evaluation criteria, highlighting its effectiveness and practicality for real-world drug discovery applications.


Normalized Maximum Likelihood Code-Length on Riemannian Manifold Data Spaces

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--In recent years, with the large-scale expansion of graph data, there has been an increased focus on Riemannian manifold data spaces other than Euclidean space. In particular, the development of hyperbolic spaces has been remarkable, and they have high expressive power for graph data with hierarchical structures. Normalized Maximum Likelihood (NML) is employed in regret minimization and model selection. However, existing formulations of NML have been developed primarily in Euclidean spaces and are inherently dependent on the choice of coordinate systems, making it non-trivial to extend NML to Riemannian manifolds. In this study, we define a new NML that reflects the geometric structure of Riemannian manifolds, called the Riemannian manifold NML (Rm-NML). This Rm-NML is invariant under coordinate transformations and coincides with the conventional NML under the natural parameterization in Euclidean space. We extend existing computational techniques for NML to the setting of Riemannian manifolds. Furthermore, we derive a method to simplify the computation of Rm-NML on Riemannian symmetric spaces, which encompass data spaces of growing interest such as hyperbolic spaces. T o illustrate the practical application of our proposed method, we explicitly computed the Rm-NML for normal distributions on hyperbolic spaces. With the recent increase in the scale of graph data, Riemannian manifold data spaces other than Euclidian spaces are attracting attention as latent spaces suitable for graph embedding [1, 2]. For example, hyperbolic spaces have been demonstrated to possess high expressive power for graph data with hierarchical structures [3]. Spherical spaces are particularly effective in representing graph data with cyclic structures [4]. Notably, research on hyperbolic spaces has been particularly remarkable[3]. Specifically, in the field of representation learning, methods that embed hierarchical structures into hyperbolic space have successfully represented such relationships using significantly lower-dimensional space compared to conventional methods based on Euclidean space, while preserving the essential relational information[2].


Towards Trustworthy Amortized Bayesian Model Comparison

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Amortized Bayesian model comparison (BMC) enables fast probabilistic ranking of models via simulation-based training of neural surrogates. However, the reliability of neural surrogates deteriorates when simulation models are misspecified - the very case where model comparison is most needed. Thus, we supplement simulation-based training with a self-consistency (SC) loss on unlabeled real data to improve BMC estimates under empirical distribution shifts. Using a numerical experiment and two case studies with real data, we compare amortized evidence estimates with and without SC against analytic or bridge sampling benchmarks. SC improves calibration under model misspecification when having access to analytic likelihoods. However, it offers limited gains with neural surrogate likelihoods, making it most practical for trustworthy BMC when likelihoods are exact.


Transfer Learning for Classification under Decision Rule Drift with Application to Optimal Individualized Treatment Rule Estimation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In this paper, we extend the transfer learning classification framework from regression function-based methods to decision rules. We propose a novel methodology for modeling posterior drift through Bayes decision rules. By exploiting the geometric transformation of the Bayes decision boundary, our method reformulates the problem as a low-dimensional empirical risk minimization problem. Under mild regularity conditions, we establish the consistency of our estimators and derive the risk bounds. Moreover, we illustrate the broad applicability of our method by adapting it to the estimation of optimal individualized treatment rules. Extensive simulation studies and analyses of real-world data further demonstrate both superior performance and robustness of our approach.


MM-HSD: Multi-Modal Hate Speech Detection in Videos

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While hate speech detection (HSD) has been extensively studied in text, existing multi-modal approaches remain limited, particularly in videos. As modalities are not always individually informative, simple fusion methods fail to fully capture inter-modal dependencies. Moreover, previous work often omits relevant modalities such as on-screen text and audio, which may contain subtle hateful content and thus provide essential cues, both individually and in combination with others. In this paper, we present MM-HSD, a multi-modal model for HSD in videos that integrates video frames, audio, and text derived from speech transcripts and from frames (i.e.~on-screen text) together with features extracted by Cross-Modal Attention (CMA). We are the first to use CMA as an early feature extractor for HSD in videos, to systematically compare query/key configurations, and to evaluate the interactions between different modalities in the CMA block. Our approach leads to improved performance when on-screen text is used as a query and the rest of the modalities serve as a key. Experiments on the HateMM dataset show that MM-HSD outperforms state-of-the-art methods on M-F1 score (0.874), using concatenation of transcript, audio, video, on-screen text, and CMA for feature extraction on raw embeddings of the modalities. The code is available at https://github.com/idiap/mm-hsd


Photonic restricted Boltzmann machine for content generation tasks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) is a neural network based on the Ising model, well known for its ability to learn probability distributions and stochastically generate new content. However, the high computational cost of Gibbs sampling in content generation tasks imposes significant bottlenecks on electronic implementations. Here, we propose a photonic restricted Boltzmann machine (PRBM) that leverages photonic computing to accelerate Gibbs sampling, enabling efficient content generation. By introducing an efficient encoding method, the PRBM eliminates the need for computationally intensive matrix decomposition and reduces the computational complexity of Gibbs sampling from $O(N)$ to $O(1)$. Moreover, its non-Von Neumann photonic computing architecture circumvents the memory storage of interaction matrices, providing substantial advantages for large-scale RBMs. We experimentally validate the photonic-accelerated Gibbs sampling by simulating a two-dimensional Ising model, where the observed phase transition temperature closely matches the theoretical predictions. Beyond physics-inspired tasks, the PRBM demonstrates robust capabilities in generating and restoring diverse content, including images and temporal sequences, even in the presence of noise and aberrations. The scalability and reduced training cost of the PRBM framework underscore its potential as a promising pathway for advancing photonic computing in generative artificial intelligence.