Undirected Networks
Learning Tractable Distributions Of Language Model Continuations
Yidou-Weng, Gwen, Li, Ian, Liu, Anji, Broadrick, Oliver, Broeck, Guy Van den, Wang, Benjie
Controlled language generation conditions text on sequence-level constraints (for example, syntax, style, or safety). These constraints may depend on future tokens, which makes directly conditioning an autoregressive language model (LM) generally intractable. Prior work uses tractable surrogates such as hidden Markov models (HMMs) to approximate the distribution over continuations and adjust the model's next-token logits at decoding time. However, we find that these surrogates are often weakly context aware, which reduces query quality. We propose Learning to Look Ahead (LTLA), a hybrid approach that pairs the same base language model for rich prefix encoding with a fixed tractable surrogate model that computes exact continuation probabilities. Two efficiency pitfalls arise when adding neural context: (i) naively rescoring the prefix with every candidate next token requires a sweep over the entire vocabulary at each step, and (ii) predicting fresh surrogate parameters for each prefix, although tractable at a single step, forces recomputation of future probabilities for every new prefix and eliminates reuse. LTLA avoids both by using a single batched HMM update to account for all next-token candidates at once, and by conditioning only the surrogate's latent state prior on the LM's hidden representations while keeping the surrogate decoder fixed, so computations can be reused across prefixes. Empirically, LTLA attains higher conditional likelihood than an unconditional HMM, approximates continuation distributions for vision-language models where a standalone HMM cannot encode visual context, and improves constraint satisfaction at comparable fluency on controlled-generation tasks, with minimal inference overhead.
MACIE: Multi-Agent Causal Intelligence Explainer for Collective Behavior Understanding
As Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning systems are used in safety critical applications. Understanding why agents make decisions and how they achieve collective behavior is crucial. Existing explainable AI methods struggle in multi agent settings. They fail to attribute collective outcomes to individuals, quantify emergent behaviors, or capture complex interactions. We present MACIE Multi Agent Causal Intelligence Explainer, a framework combining structural causal models, interventional counterfactuals, and Shapley values to provide comprehensive explanations. MACIE addresses three questions. First, each agent's causal contribution using interventional attribution scores. Second, system level emergent intelligence through synergy metrics separating collective effects from individual contributions. Third, actionable explanations using natural language narratives synthesizing causal insights. We evaluate MACIE across four MARL scenarios: cooperative, competitive, and mixed motive. Results show accurate outcome attribution, mean phi_i equals 5.07, standard deviation less than 0.05, detection of positive emergence in cooperative tasks, synergy index up to 0.461, and efficient computation, 0.79 seconds per dataset on CPU. MACIE uniquely combines causal rigor, emergence quantification, and multi agent support while remaining practical for real time use. This represents a step toward interpretable, trustworthy, and accountable multi agent AI.
From Static to Adaptive Defense: Federated Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning-Driven Moving Target Defense Against DoS Attacks in UAV Swarm Networks
Zhou, Yuyang, Cheng, Guang, Du, Kang, Chen, Zihan, Qin, Tian, Zhao, Yuyu
Abstract--The proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UA Vs) has enabled a wide range of mission-critical applications and is becoming a cornerstone of low-altitude networks, supporting smart cities, emergency response, and more. However, the open wireless environment, dynamic topology, and resource constraints of UA Vs expose low-altitude networks to severe Denial-of-Service (DoS) threats, undermining their reliability and security. Traditional defense approaches, which rely on fixed configurations or centralized decision-making, cannot effectively respond to the rapidly changing conditions in UA V swarm environments. T o address these challenges, we propose a novel federated multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (FMADRL)- driven moving target defense (MTD) framework for proactive DoS mitigation in low-altitude networks. Specifically, we design lightweight and coordinated MTD mechanisms, including leader switching, route mutation, and frequency hopping, to disrupt attacker efforts and enhance network resilience. The defense problem is formulated as a multi-agent partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), capturing the uncertain nature of UA V swarms under attack. Each UA V is equipped with a policy agent that autonomously selects MTD actions based on partial observations and local experiences. By employing a policy gradient-based FMADRL algorithm, UA Vs collaboratively optimize their policies via reward-weighted aggregation, enabling distributed learning without sharing raw data and thus reducing communication overhead. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to a 34.6% improvement in attack mitigation rate, a reduction in average recovery time of up to 94.6%, and decreases in energy consumption and defense cost by as much as 29.3% and 98.3%, respectively, under various DoS attack strategies. These results highlight the potential of intelligent, distributed defense mechanisms to protect low-altitude networks, paving the way for reliable and scalable low-altitude economy. HE rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UA V) technology [1] has enabled a wide range of applications, including environmental monitoring, disaster response, precision agriculture, logistics, aerial photography, and intelligent surveillance [2]. Y uyang Zhou, Guang Cheng, Kang Du, Zihan Chen, Tian Qin, and Y uyu Zhao are with the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Purple Mountain Laboratories, and Jiangsu Province Engineering Research Center of Security for Ubiquitous Network, Nanjing 211189, China. Guang Cheng is the corresponding author. It is expected to play an increasingly important role in smart cities, emergency management, and next-generation communication infrastructures, forming the backbone of low-altitude networks. Nevertheless, the widespread adoption of UA V swarms also brings new security challenges [7], [8] to low-altitude networks.
PoE-World: Compositional World Modeling with Products of Programmatic Experts
Piriyakulkij, Wasu Top, Liang, Yichao, Tang, Hao, Weller, Adrian, Kryven, Marta, Ellis, Kevin
Learning how the world works is central to building AI agents that can adapt to complex environments. Traditional world models based on deep learning demand vast amounts of training data, and do not flexibly update their knowledge from sparse observations. Recent advances in program synthesis using Large Language Models (LLMs) give an alternate approach which learns world models represented as source code, supporting strong generalization from little data. To date, application of program-structured world models remains limited to natural language and grid-world domains. We introduce a novel program synthesis method for effectively modeling complex, non-gridworld domains by representing a world model as an exponentially-weighted product of programmatic experts (PoE-World) synthesized by LLMs. We show that this approach can learn complex, stochastic world models from just a few observations. We evaluate the learned world models by embedding them in a model-based planning agent, demonstrating efficient performance and generalization to unseen levels on Atari's Pong and Montezuma's Revenge. We release our code and display the learned world models and videos of the agent's gameplay at https://topwasu.github.io/poe-world.
Inverse Filtering for Hidden Markov Models
This paper considers a number of related inverse filtering problems for hidden Markov models (HMMs). In particular, given a sequence of state posteriors and the system dynamics; i) estimate the corresponding sequence of observations, ii) estimate the observation likelihoods, and iii) jointly estimate the observation likelihoods and the observation sequence. We show how to avoid a computationally expensive mixed integer linear program (MILP) by exploiting the algebraic structure of the HMM filter using simple linear algebra operations, and provide conditions for when the quantities can be uniquely reconstructed. We also propose a solution to the more general case where the posteriors are noisily observed. Finally, the proposed inverse filtering algorithms are evaluated on real-world polysomnographic data used for automatic sleep segmentation.
rho-POMDPs have Lipschitz-Continuous epsilon-Optimal Value Functions
Many state-of-the-art algorithms for solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) rely on turning the problem into a "fully observable" problem--a belief MDP--and exploiting the piece-wise linearity and convexity (PWLC) of the optimal value function in this new state space (the belief simplex). This approach has been extended to solving ρ-POMDPs--i.e., for information-oriented criteria--when the reward ρ is convex in . General ρ-POMDPs can also be turned into "fully observable" problems, but with no means to exploit the PWLC property. In this paper, we focus on POMDPs and ρ-POMDPs with λ ρ -Lipschitz reward function, and demonstrate that, for finite horizons, the optimal value function is Lipschitz-continuous. Then, value function approximators are proposed for both upper-and lower-bounding the optimal value function, which are shown to provide uniformly improvable bounds. This allows proposing two algorithms derived from HSVI which are empirically evaluated on various benchmark problems.
Deep Homogeneous Mixture Models: Representation, Separation, and Approximation
At their core, many unsupervised learning models provide a compact representation of homogeneous density mixtures, but their similarities and differences are not always clearly understood. In this work, we formally establish the relationships among latent tree graphical models (including special cases such as hidden Markov models and tensorial mixture models), hierarchical tensor formats and sum-product networks. Based on this connection, we then give a unified treatment of exponential separation in \emph{exact} representation size between deep mixture architectures and shallow ones. In contrast, for \emph{approximate} representation, we show that the conditional gradient algorithm can approximate any homogeneous mixture within $\epsilon$ accuracy by combining $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ ``shallow'' architectures, where the hidden constant may decrease (exponentially) with respect to the depth. Our experiments on both synthetic and real datasets confirm the benefits of depth in density estimation.
Near-Optimal Time and Sample Complexities for Solving Markov Decision Processes with a Generative Model
In this paper we consider the problem of computing an $\epsilon$-optimal policy of a discounted Markov Decision Process (DMDP) provided we can only access its transition function through a generative sampling model that given any state-action pair samples from the transition function in $O(1)$ time.