The distribution of data changes over time; models operating in dynamic environments need retraining. But knowing when to retrain, without access to labels, is an open challenge since some, but not all shifts degrade model performance. This paper formalizes and addresses the problem of post-deployment deterioration (PDD) monitoring. We propose D3M, a practical and efficient monitoring algorithm based on the disagreement of predictive models, achieving low false positive rates under non-deteriorating shifts and provides sample complexity bounds for high true positive rates under deteriorating shifts. Empirical results on both standard benchmark and a real-world large-scale internal medicine dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework and highlight its viability as an alert mechanism for high-stakes machine learning pipelines.

Training a team of agents from scratch in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is highly inefficient, much like asking beginners to play a symphony together without first practicing solo. Existing methods, such as offline or transferable MARL, can ease this burden, but they still rely on costly multi-agent data, which often becomes the bottleneck. In contrast, solo experiences are far easier to obtain in many important scenarios, e.g., collaborative coding, household cooperation, and search-and-rescue. To unlock their potential, we propose Solo-to-Collaborative RL (SoCo), a framework that transfers solo knowledge into cooperative learning. SoCo first pretrains a shared solo policy from solo demonstrations, then adapts it for cooperation during multi-agent training through a policy fusion mechanism that combines an MoE-like gating selector and an action editor. Experiments across diverse cooperative tasks show that SoCo significantly boosts the training efficiency and performance of backbone algorithms. These results demonstrate that solo demonstrations provide a scalable and effective complement to multi-agent data, making cooperative learning more practical and broadly applicable.

Idempotent Generative Networks (IGNs) are deep generative models that also function as local data manifold projectors, mapping arbitrary inputs back onto the manifold. They are trained to act as identity operators on the data and as idempotent operators off the data manifold. However, IGNs suffer from mode collapse, mode dropping, and training instability due to their objectives, which contain adversarial components and can cause the model to cover the data manifold only partially -- an issue shared with generative adversarial networks. We introduce Non-Adversarial Idempotent Generative Networks (NAIGNs) to address these issues. Our loss function combines reconstruction with the non-adversarial generative objective of Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE). This improves on IGN's ability to restore corrupted data and generate new samples that closely match the data distribution. We moreover demonstrate that NAIGNs implicitly learn the distance field to the data manifold, as well as an energy-based model.

Large language models (LLMs) are often queried multiple times at test time, with predictions aggregated by majority vote. While effective, this self-consistency strategy (arXiv:2203.11171) requires a fixed number of calls and can fail when the correct answer is rare. We introduce Confidence-Guided Early Stopping (CGES), a Bayesian framework that forms posteriors over candidate answers using scalar confidence signals derived from token probabilities or reward models. CGES adaptively halts sampling once the posterior mass of a candidate exceeds a threshold. We provide theoretical guarantees for both perfectly calibrated confidences and realistic noisy confidence signals. Across five reasoning benchmarks, CGES reduces the average number of model calls by about 69 percent (for example, from 16.0 to 4.9) while matching the accuracy of self-consistency within 0.06 percentage points.

Biological networks are pivotal in deciphering the complexity and functionality of biological systems. Causal inference, which focuses on determining the directionality and strength of interactions between variables rather than merely relying on correlations, is considered a logical approach for inferring biological networks. Existing methods for causal structure inference typically assume that causal relationships between variables can be represented by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). However, this assumption is at odds with the reality of widespread feedback loops in biological systems, making these methods unsuitable for direct use in biological network inference. In this study, we propose a new framework named SCALD (Structural CAusal model for Loop Diagram), which employs a nonlinear structure equation model and a stable feedback loop conditional constraint through continuous optimization to infer causal regulatory relationships under feedback loops. We observe that SCALD outperforms state-of-the-art methods in inferring both transcriptional regulatory networks and signaling transduction networks. SCALD has irreplaceable advantages in identifying feedback regulation. Through transcription factor (TF) perturbation data analysis, we further validate the accuracy and sensitivity of SCALD. Additionally, SCALD facilitates the discovery of previously unknown regulatory relationships, which we have subsequently confirmed through ChIP-seq data analysis. Furthermore, by utilizing SCALD, we infer the key driver genes that facilitate the transformation from colon inflammation to cancer by examining the dynamic changes within regulatory networks during the process.

Agents that understand objects and their interactions can learn policies that are more robust and transferable. However, most object-centric RL methods factor state by individual objects while leaving interactions implicit. We introduce the Factored Interactive Object-Centric World Model (FIOC-WM), a unified framework that learns structured representations of both objects and their interactions within a world model. FIOC-WM captures environment dynamics with disentangled and modular representations of object interactions, improving sample efficiency and generalization for policy learning. Concretely, FIOC-WM first learns object-centric latents and an interaction structure directly from pixels, leveraging pre-trained vision encoders. The learned world model then decomposes tasks into composable interaction primitives, and a hierarchical policy is trained on top: a high level selects the type and order of interactions, while a low level executes them. On simulated robotic and embodied-AI benchmarks, FIOC-WM improves policy-learning sample efficiency and generalization over world-model baselines, indicating that explicit, modular interaction learning is crucial for robust control.

Next-generation wireless communication systems must support ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) service for mission-critical applications. Meeting stringent URLLC requirements is challenging, especially for two-hop cooperative communication. In this paper, we develop an adaptive transmission design for a two-hop relaying communication system. Each hop transmission adaptively configures its transmission parameters separately, including numerology, mini-slot size, and modulation and coding scheme, for reliable packet transmission within a strict latency constraint. We formulate the hop-specific transceiver configuration as a Markov decision process (MDP) and propose a dual-agent reinforcement learning-based cooperative latency-aware transmission (DRL-CoLA) algorithm to learn latency-aware transmission policies in a distributed manner. Simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm achieves the near-optimal reliability while satisfying strict latency requirements.

The field of world modeling is fragmented, with researchers developing bespoke architectures that rarely build upon each other. We propose a framework that specifies the natural building blocks for structured world models based on the fundamental stochastic processes that any world model must capture: discrete processes (logic, symbols) and continuous processes (physics, dynamics); the world model is then defined by the hierarchical composition of these building blocks. We examine Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and switching linear dynamical systems (sLDS) as natural building blocks for discrete and continuous modeling--which become partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) and controlled sLDS when augmented with actions. This modular approach supports both passive modeling (generation, forecasting) and active control (planning, decision-making) within the same architecture. We avoid the combinatorial explosion of traditional structure learning by largely fixing the causal architecture and searching over only four depth parameters. We review practical expressiveness through multimodal generative modeling (passive) and planning from pixels (active), with performance competitive to neural approaches while maintaining interpretability. The core outstanding challenge is scalable joint structure-parameter learning; current methods finesse this by cleverly growing structure and parameters incrementally, but are limited in their scalability. If solved, these natural building blocks could provide foundational infrastructure for world modeling, analogous to how standardized layers enabled progress in deep learning.

In equilibrium statistical mechanics, phases are parameter regions in which the free energy evolves smoothly. This equilibrium perspective is well suited to to conventional solid-state experiments, in which the system of interest (e.g., the electron fluid in a metal) is well coupled to a heat bath. Present-day experiments in quantum devices necessitate a more general concept of phases: in these devices, systems are driven far from thermal equilibrium and are either isolated from the environment or coupled to engineered dissipative environments. A key step toward this general concept came from the development of quasi-adiabatic continuation [1], for pure quantum states at zero temperature. According to this definition, phases are equivalence classes of quantum states such that two states in the same phase can be prepared from one another by an efficient process--specifically, a finite-depth local unitary (FDLU) circuit. This concept of pure-state phases (called FDLU-equivalence) reduces to the conventional one for ground states of gapped local Hamiltonians, but extends to any quantum state, and connects naturally to questions in computational complexity thoery [2-5]. So far, this "preparability" perspective is only fully developed for pure quantum states and strictly unitary evolutions; thus, a natural task, which has seen intense recent activity, is its generalization to more general classes of mixed states and evolutions involving noise, measurement, and feedback [6-14]. As an important special case, a classification of mixed states from the perspective of preparability would naturally extend to general classical probability distributions, of the type that routinely arise in machine learning, and that also seem to exhibit phase transitions [15].

Pulsar Timing Arrays provide a powerful framework to measure low-frequency gravitational waves, but accuracy and robustness of the results are challenged by complex noise processes that must be accurately modeled. Standard PTA analyses assign fixed uniform noise priors to each pulsar, an approach that can introduce systematic biases when combining the array. To overcome this limitation, we adopt a hierarchical Bayesian modeling strategy in which noise priors are parametrized by higher-level hyperparameters. We further address the challenge posed by the correlations between hyperparameters and physical noise parameters, focusing on those describing red noise and dispersion measure variations. To decorrelate these quantities, we introduce an orthogonal reparametrization of the hierarchical model implemented with Normalizing Flows. We also employ i-nessai, a flow-guided nested sampler, to efficiently explore the resulting higher-dimensional parameter space. We apply our method to a minimal 3-pulsar case study, performing a simultaneous inference of noise and SGWB parameters. Despite the limited dataset, the results consistently show that the hierarchical treatment constrains the noise parameters more tightly and partially alleviates the red-noise-SGWB degeneracy, while the orthogonal reparametrization further enhances parameter independence without affecting the correlations intrinsic to the power-law modeling of the physical processes involved.