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 Directed Networks


Toward Temporal Causal Representation Learning with Tensor Decomposition

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Temporal causal representation learning is a powerful tool for uncovering complex patterns in observational studies, which are often represented as low-dimensional time series. However, in many real-world applications, data are high-dimensional with varying input lengths and naturally take the form of irregular tensors. To analyze such data, irregular tensor decomposition is critical for extracting meaningful clusters that capture essential information. In this paper, we focus on modeling causal representation learning based on the transformed information. First, we present a novel causal formulation for a set of latent clusters. We then propose CaRTeD, a joint learning framework that integrates temporal causal representation learning with irregular tensor decomposition. Notably, our framework provides a blueprint for downstream tasks using the learned tensor factors, such as modeling latent structures and extracting causal information, and offers a more flexible regularization design to enhance tensor decomposition. Theoretically, we show that our algorithm converges to a stationary point. More importantly, our results fill the gap in theoretical guarantees for the convergence of state-of-the-art irregular tensor decomposition. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world electronic health record (EHR) datasets (MIMIC-III), with extensive benchmarks from both phenotyping and network recovery perspectives, demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques and enhances the explainability of causal representations.


Step-DAD: Semi-Amortized Policy-Based Bayesian Experimental Design

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We develop a semi-amortized, policy-based, approach to Bayesian experimental design (BED) called Stepwise Deep Adaptive Design (Step-DAD). Like existing, fully amortized, policy-based BED approaches, Step-DAD trains a design policy upfront before the experiment. However, rather than keeping this policy fixed, Step-DAD periodically updates it as data is gathered, refining it to the particular experimental instance. This test-time adaptation improves both the flexibility and the robustness of the design strategy compared with existing approaches. Empirically, Step-DAD consistently demonstrates superior decision-making and robustness compared with current state-of-the-art BED methods.


Context-Aware Behavior Learning with Heuristic Motion Memory for Underwater Manipulation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Autonomous motion planning is critical for efficient and safe underwater manipulation in dynamic marine environments. Current motion planning methods often fail to effectively utilize prior motion experiences and adapt to real-time uncertainties inherent in underwater settings. In this paper, we introduce an Adaptive Heuristic Motion Planner framework that integrates a Heuristic Motion Space (HMS) with Bayesian Networks to enhance motion planning for autonomous underwater manipulation. Our approach employs the Probabilistic Roadmap (PRM) algorithm within HMS to optimize paths by minimizing a composite cost function that accounts for distance, uncertainty, energy consumption, and execution time. By leveraging HMS, our framework significantly reduces the search space, thereby boosting computational performance and enabling real-time planning capabilities. Bayesian Networks are utilized to dynamically update uncertainty estimates based on real-time sensor data and environmental conditions, thereby refining the joint probability of path success. Through extensive simulations and real-world test scenarios, we showcase the advantages of our method in terms of enhanced performance and robustness. This probabilistic approach significantly advances the capability of autonomous underwater robots, ensuring optimized motion planning in the face of dynamic marine challenges.


CPC-CMS: Cognitive Pairwise Comparison Classification Model Selection Framework for Document-level Sentiment Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study proposes the Cognitive Pairwise Comparison Classification Model Selection (CPC-CMS) framework for document-level sentiment analysis. The CPC, based on expert knowledge judgment, is used to calculate the weights of evaluation criteria, including accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, specificity, Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC), Cohen's Kappa (Kappa), and efficiency. Naive Bayes, Linear Support Vector Classification (LSVC), Random Forest, Logistic Regression, Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and A Lite Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (ALBERT) are chosen as classification baseline models. A weighted decision matrix consisting of classification evaluation scores with respect to criteria weights, is formed to select the best classification model for a classification problem. Three open datasets of social media are used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed CPC-CMS. Based on our simulation, for evaluation results excluding the time factor, ALBERT is the best for the three datasets; if time consumption is included, no single model always performs better than the other models. The CPC-CMS can be applied to the other classification applications in different areas.


A Survey of Dimension Estimation Methods

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

It is a standard assumption that datasets in high dimension have an internal structure which means that they in fact lie on, or near, subsets of a lower dimension. In many instances it is important to understand the real dimension of the data, hence the complexity of the dataset at hand. A great variety of dimension estimators have been developed to find the intrinsic dimension of the data but there is little guidance on how to reliably use these estimators. This survey reviews a wide range of dimension estimation methods, categorising them by the geometric information they exploit: tangential estimators which detect a local affine structure; parametric estimators which rely on dimension-dependent probability distributions; and estimators which use topological or metric invariants. The paper evaluates the performance of these methods, as well as investigating varying responses to curvature and noise. Key issues addressed include robustness to hyperparameter selection, sample size requirements, accuracy in high dimensions, precision, and performance on non-linear geometries. In identifying the best hyperparameters for benchmark datasets, overfitting is frequent, indicating that many estimators may not generalise well beyond the datasets on which they have been tested.


On-the-Fly Fine-Tuning of Foundational Neural Network Potentials: A Bayesian Neural Network Approach

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Due to the computational complexity of evaluating interatomic forces from first principles, the creation of interatomic machine learning force fields has become a highly active field of research. However, the generation of training datasets of sufficient size and sample diversity itself comes with a computational burden that can make this approach impractical for modeling rare events or systems with a large configuration space. Fine-tuning foundation models that have been pre-trained on large-scale material or molecular databases offers a promising opportunity to reduce the amount of training data necessary to reach a desired level of accuracy. However, even if this approach requires less training data overall, creating a suitable training dataset can still be a very challenging problem, especially for systems with rare events and for end-users who don't have an extensive background in machine learning. In on-the-fly learning, the creation of a training dataset can be largely automated by using model uncertainty during the simulation to decide if the model is accurate enough or if a structure should be recalculated with classical methods and used to update the model. A key challenge for applying this form of active learning to the fine-tuning of foundation models is how to assess the uncertainty of those models during the fine-tuning process, even though most foundation models lack any form of uncertainty quantification. In this paper, we overcome this challenge by introducing a fine-tuning approach based on Bayesian neural network methods and a subsequent on-the-fly workflow that automatically fine-tunes the model while maintaining a pre-specified accuracy and can detect rare events such as transition states and sample them at an increased rate relative to their occurrence.


An Enhanced Model-based Approach for Short Text Clustering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--Short text clustering has become increasingly important with the popularity of social media like Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. Existing methods can be broadly categorized into two paradigms: topic model-based approaches and deep representation learning-based approaches. This task is inherently challenging due to the sparse, large-scale, and high-dimensional characteristics of the short text data. Furthermore, the computational intensity required by representation learning significantly increases the running time. T o address these issues, we propose a collapsed Gibbs Sampling algorithm for the Dirichlet Multinomial Mixture model (GSDMM), which effectively handles the sparsity and high dimensionality of short texts while identifying representative words for each cluster . Based on several aspects of GSDMM that warrant further refinement, we propose an improved approach, GSDMM+, designed to further optimize its performance. GSDMM+ reduces initialization noise and adap-tively adjusts word weights based on entropy, achieving fine-grained clustering that reveals more topic-related information. Additionally, strategic cluster merging is employed to refine clustering granularity, better aligning the predicted distribution with the true category distribution. We conduct extensive experiments, comparing our methods with both classical and state-of-the-art approaches. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our methods. The source code for our model is publicly available at https://github.com/chehaoa/VEMC. HE proliferation of mobile internet has led to an exponential increase in user-generated data on online platforms, including video, text, and image data. Intelligent processing of such data can significantly enhance the quality of life across society and generate substantial economic benefits. Short text data are a prevalent and important form of user-generated data, consisting of concise texts such as microblogs and comments.


Modeling Open-World Cognition as On-Demand Synthesis of Probabilistic Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

When faced with novel situations, people are able to marshal relevant considerations from a wide range of background knowledge and put these to use in inferences and predictions. What permits us to draw in globally relevant information and reason over it coherently? Here, we explore the hypothesis that people use a combination of distributed and symbolic representations to construct bespoke mental models tailored to novel situations. We propose a computational implementation of this idea -- a ``Model Synthesis Architecture'' (MSA) -- using language models to implement global relevance-based retrieval and model synthesis and probabilistic programs to implement bespoke, coherent world models. We evaluate our MSA as a model of human judgments on a novel reasoning dataset. The dataset -- built around a `Model Olympics` domain of sports vignettes -- tests models' capacity for human-like, open-ended reasoning by requiring (i) judgments about novel causal structures described in language; (ii) drawing on large bodies of background knowledge; and (iii) doing both in light of observations that introduce arbitrary novel variables. Our MSA approach captures human judgments better than language model-only baselines, under both direct and chain-of-thought generations from the LM that supports model synthesis. These results suggest that MSAs can be implemented in a way that mirrors people's ability to deliver locally coherent reasoning over globally relevant variables, offering a path to understanding and replicating human reasoning in open-ended domains.


Variational Inference for Latent Variable Models in High Dimensions

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In modern applications, these models typically involve a large number of parameters and latent variables, resulting in complex and high-dimensional posteriors that are computationally intractable. For such scenarios, traditional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approaches often suffer from lengthy burn-in periods and generally lack scalability [11]. Recently, variational inference (VI) [31, 10, 52, 11] has emerged as a popular and scalable alternative method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in large-scale applications (where the number of observations and dimensionality are both large) and is typically orders of magnitude faster than MCMC methods. Among the various forms of VI, arguably the most widely used and important is mean-field variational inference (MFVI) [52, 11], which approximates the intractable posterior by a product distribution. This approach has been widely adopted in statistics and machine learning, thanks to efficient algorithmic implementations based on coordinate ascent variational inference (CAVI) [10, 11, 19, 7, 5, 36, 14, 34].


When Pattern-by-Pattern Works: Theoretical and Empirical Insights for Logistic Models with Missing Values

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Predicting a response with partially missing inputs remains a challenging task even in parametric models, since parameter estimation in itself is not sufficient to predict on partially observed inputs. Several works study prediction in linear models. In this paper, we focus on logistic models, which present their own difficulties. From a theoretical perspective, we prove that a Pattern-by-Pattern strategy (PbP), which learns one logistic model per missingness pattern, accurately approximates Bayes probabilities in various missing data scenarios (MCAR, MAR and MNAR). Empirically, we thoroughly compare various methods (constant and iterative imputations, complete case analysis, PbP, and an EM algorithm) across classification, probability estimation, calibration, and parameter inference. Our analysis provides a comprehensive view on the logistic regression with missing values. It reveals that mean imputation can be used as baseline for low sample sizes, and improved performance is obtained via nonlinear multiple iterative imputation techniques with the labels ( MICE.RF.Y). For large sample sizes, PbP is the best method for Gaussian mixtures, and we recommend MICE.RF.Y in presence of nonlinear features.