Learning Graphical Models
Dynamic Bottleneck for Robust Self-Supervised Exploration
However, such methods are usually sensitive to environmental dynamics-irrelevant information, e.g., white-noise. To handle such dynamics-irrelevant information, we propose a Dynamic Bottleneck (DB) model, which attains a dynamics-relevant representation based on the information-bottleneck principle.
One-Shot Multi-Label Causal Discovery in High-Dimensional Event Sequences
Math, Hugo, Schön, Robin, Lienhart, Rainer
Understanding causality in event sequences with thousands of sparse event types is critical in domains such as healthcare, cybersecurity, or vehicle diagnostics, yet current methods fail to scale. We present OSCAR, a one-shot causal autoregressive method that infers per-sequence Markov Boundaries using two pretrained Transformers as density estimators. This enables efficient, parallel causal discovery without costly global CI testing. On a real-world automotive dataset with 29,100 events and 474 labels, OSCAR recovers interpretable causal structures in minutes, while classical methods fail to scale, enabling practical scientific diagnostics at production scale.
Transfer in Reinforcement Learning via Regret Bounds for Learning Agents
Tuynman, Adrienne, Ortner, Ronald
We present an approach for the quantification of the usefulness of transfer in reinforcement learning via regret bounds for a multi-agent setting. Considering a number of $\aleph$ agents operating in the same Markov decision process, however possibly with different reward functions, we consider the regret each agent suffers with respect to an optimal policy maximizing her average reward. We show that when the agents share their observations the total regret of all agents is smaller by a factor of $\sqrt{\aleph}$ compared to the case when each agent has to rely on the information collected by herself. This result demonstrates how considering the regret in multi-agent settings can provide theoretical bounds on the benefit of sharing observations in transfer learning.
Belief Net: A Filter-Based Framework for Learning Hidden Markov Models from Observations
Chen, Reginald Zhiyan, Chang, Heng-Sheng, Mehta, Prashant G.
Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are fundamental for modeling sequential data, yet learning their parameters from observations remains challenging. Classical methods like the Baum-Welch (EM) algorithm are computationally intensive and prone to local optima, while modern spectral algorithms offer provable guarantees but may produce probability outputs outside valid ranges. This work introduces Belief Net, a novel framework that learns HMM parameters through gradient-based optimization by formulating the HMM's forward filter as a structured neural network. Unlike black-box Transformer models, Belief Net's learnable weights are explicitly the logits of the initial distribution, transition matrix, and emission matrix, ensuring full interpretability. The model processes observation sequences using a decoder-only architecture and is trained end-to-end with standard autoregressive next-observation prediction loss. On synthetic HMM data, Belief Net achieves superior convergence speed compared to Baum-Welch, successfully recovering parameters in both undercomplete and overcomplete settings where spectral methods fail. Comparisons with Transformer-based models are also presented on real-world language data.
Temporal Properties of Conditional Independence in Dynamic Bayesian Networks
Aghamov, Rajab, Baier, Christel, Ouaknine, Joel, Piribauer, Jakob, Vahanwala, Mihir, Vialard, Isa
Dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) are compact graphical representations used to model probabilistic systems where interdependent random variables and their distributions evolve over time. In this paper, we study the verification of the evolution of conditional-independence (CI) propositions against temporal logic specifications. To this end, we consider two specification formalisms over CI propositions: linear temporal logic (LTL), and non-deterministic Büchi automata (NBAs). This problem has two variants. Stochastic CI properties take the given concrete probability distributions into account, while structural CI properties are viewed purely in terms of the graphical structure of the DBN. We show that deciding if a stochastic CI proposition eventually holds is at least as hard as the Skolem problem for linear recurrence sequences, a long-standing open problem in number theory. On the other hand, we show that verifying the evolution of structural CI propositions against LTL and NBA specifications is in PSPACE, and is NP- and coNP-hard. We also identify natural restrictions on the graphical structure of DBNs that make the verification of structural CI properties tractable.
HierRouter: Coordinated Routing of Specialized Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning
Gupta, Nikunj, Guo, Bill, Kannan, Rajgopal, Prasanna, Viktor K.
Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver state-of-the-art performance across many tasks but impose high computational and memory costs, limiting their deployment in resource-constrained or real-time settings. To address this, we propose HierRouter, a hierarchical routing approach that dynamically assembles inference pipelines from a pool of specialized, lightweight language models. Formulated as a finite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP), our approach trains a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based reinforcement learning agent to iteratively select which models to invoke at each stage of multi-hop inference. The agent conditions on the evolving context and accumulated cost to make context-aware routing decisions. Experiments with three open-source candidate LLMs across six benchmarks, including QA, code generation, and mathematical reasoning, show that HierRouter improves response quality by up to 2.4x compared to using individual models independently, while incurring only a minimal additional inference cost on average. These results highlight the promise of hierarchical routing for cost-efficient, high-performance LLM inference. All codes can be found here https://github.com/ Nikunj-Gupta/hierouter.