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Reinforcement Learning for Durable Algorithmic Recourse

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Algorithmic recourse seeks to provide individuals with actionable recommendations that increase their chances of receiving favorable outcomes from automated decision systems (e.g., loan approvals). While prior research has emphasized robustness to model updates, considerably less attention has been given to the temporal dynamics of recourse--particularly in competitive, resource-constrained settings where recommendations shape future applicant pools. In this work, we present a novel time-aware framework for algorithmic recourse, explicitly modeling how candidate populations adapt in response to recommendations. Additionally, we introduce a novel reinforcement learning (RL)-based recourse algorithm that captures the evolving dynamics of the environment to generate recommendations that are both feasible and valid. We design our recommendations to be durable, supporting validity over a predefined time horizon T. This durability allows individuals to confidently reapply after taking time to implement the suggested changes. Through extensive experiments in complex simulation environments, we show that our approach substantially outperforms existing baselines, offering a superior balance between feasibility and long-term validity. Together, these results underscore the importance of incorporating temporal and behavioral dynamics into the design of practical recourse systems.


Modelling non-stationary extremal dependence through a geometric approach

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Non-stationary extremal dependence, whereby the relationship between the extremes of multiple variables evolves over time, is commonly observed in many environmental and financial data sets. However, most multivariate extreme value models are only suited to stationary data. A recent approach to multivariate extreme value modelling uses a geometric framework, whereby extremal dependence features are inferred through the limiting shapes of scaled sample clouds. This framework can capture a wide range of dependence structures, and a variety of inference procedures have been proposed in the stationary setting. In this work, we first extend the geometric framework to the non-stationary setting and outline assumptions to ensure the necessary convergence conditions hold. We then introduce a flexible, semi-parametric modelling framework for obtaining estimates of limit sets in the non-stationary setting. Through rigorous simulation studies, we demonstrate that our proposed framework can capture a wide range of dependence forms and is robust to different model formulations. We illustrate the proposed methods on financial returns data and present several practical uses.


Multidimensional Uncertainty Quantification via Optimal Transport

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Most uncertainty quantification (UQ) approaches provide a single scalar value as a measure of model reliability. However, different uncertainty measures could provide complementary information on the prediction confidence. Even measures targeting the same type of uncertainty (e.g., ensemble-based and density-based measures of epistemic uncertainty) may capture different failure modes. We take a multidimensional view on UQ by stacking complementary UQ measures into a vector. Such vectors are assigned with Monge-Kantorovich ranks produced by an optimal-transport-based ordering method. The prediction is then deemed more uncertain than the other if it has a higher rank. The resulting VecUQ-OT algorithm uses entropy-regularized optimal transport. The transport map is learned on vectors of scores from in-distribution data and, by design, applies to unseen inputs, including out-of-distribution cases, without retraining. Our framework supports flexible non-additive uncertainty fusion (including aleatoric and epistemic components). It yields a robust ordering for downstream tasks such as selective prediction, misclassification detection, out-of-distribution detection, and selective generation. Across synthetic, image, and text data, VecUQ-OT shows high efficiency even when individual measures fail. The code for the method is available at: https://github.com/stat-ml/multidimensional_uncertainty.


Direct Bias-Correction Term Estimation for Propensity Scores and Average Treatment Effect Estimation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This study considers the estimation of the average treatment effect (ATE). For ATE estimation, we estimate the propensity score through direct bias-correction term estimation. Let $\{(X_i, D_i, Y_i)\}_{i=1}^{n}$ be the observations, where $X_i \in \mathbb{R}^p$ denotes $p$-dimensional covariates, $D_i \in \{0, 1\}$ denotes a binary treatment assignment indicator, and $Y_i \in \mathbb{R}$ is an outcome. In ATE estimation, the bias-correction term $h_0(X_i, D_i) = \frac{1[D_i = 1]}{e_0(X_i)} - \frac{1[D_i = 0]}{1 - e_0(X_i)}$ plays an important role, where $e_0(X_i)$ is the propensity score, the probability of being assigned treatment $1$. In this study, we propose estimating $h_0$ (or equivalently the propensity score $e_0$) by directly minimizing the prediction error of $h_0$. Since the bias-correction term $h_0$ is essential for ATE estimation, this direct approach is expected to improve estimation accuracy for the ATE. For example, existing studies often employ maximum likelihood or covariate balancing to estimate $e_0$, but these approaches may not be optimal for accurately estimating $h_0$ or the ATE. We present a general framework for this direct bias-correction term estimation approach from the perspective of Bregman divergence minimization and conduct simulation studies to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method.


A Nonparametric Discrete Hawkes Model with a Collapsed Gaussian-Process Prior

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Hawkes process models are used in settings where past events increase the likelihood of future events occurring. Many applications record events as counts on a regular grid, yet discrete-time Hawkes models remain comparatively underused and are often constrained by fixed-form baselines and excitation kernels. In particular, there is a lack of flexible, nonparametric treatments of both the baseline and the excitation in discrete time. To this end, we propose the Gaussian Process Discrete Hawkes Process (GP-DHP), a nonparametric framework that places Gaussian process priors on both the baseline and the excitation and performs inference through a collapsed latent representation. This yields smooth, data-adaptive structure without prespecifying trends, periodicities, or decay shapes, and enables maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation with near-linear-time \(O(T\log T)\) complexity. A closed-form projection recovers interpretable baseline and excitation functions from the optimized latent trajectory. In simulations, GP-DHP recovers diverse excitation shapes and evolving baselines. In case studies on U.S. terrorism incidents and weekly Cryptosporidiosis counts, it improves test predictive log-likelihood over standard parametric discrete Hawkes baselines while capturing bursts, delays, and seasonal background variation. The results indicate that flexible discrete-time self-excitation can be achieved without sacrificing scalability or interpretability.


Error Analysis of Discrete Flow with Generator Matching

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Discrete diffusion models have achieved significant progress in large language models [24, 42, 41, 39]. By learning the time reversal of the noising process of a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC), the models transform a simple distribution (e.g., uniform [19, 23] and masked [26, 32, 30]) that is easy to sample to the data distribution that has discrete structures. Discrete flow models [10, 16, 31] provides a flexible framework for learning generating transition rate analogous to continuous flow matching [1, 22, 21], offering a more comprehensive family of probability paths. Recent theoretical analysis for discrete diffusion models has emerged through numerous studies [11, 40, 28, 29]. To obtain the transition rate in the reversed process, the concrete scores in these analyses are obtained by minimizing the concrete score entropy introduced in [23, 8]. In those works, the distribution errors of discrete diffusion models are divided into three parts: (a) truncation error from truncating the time horizon in the noising process; (b) concrete score estimation error; (c) discretization error from sampling algorithms. In our paper, we aim to investigate the theoretical properties of the discrete flow-based models using the generator matching training objective [18] and the uniformization sampling algorithm [11], which offers zero truncation error and discretization error.


Differentiable Structure Learning for General Binary Data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Existing methods for differentiable structure learning in discrete data typically assume that the data are generated from specific structural equation models. However, these assumptions may not align with the true data-generating process, which limits the general applicability of such methods. Furthermore, current approaches often ignore the complex dependence structure inherent in discrete data and consider only linear effects. We propose a differentiable structure learning framework that is capable of capturing arbitrary dependencies among discrete variables. We show that although general discrete models are unidentifiable from purely observational data, it is possible to characterize the complete set of compatible parameters and structures. Additionally, we establish identifiability up to Markov equivalence under mild assumptions. We formulate the learning problem as a single differentiable optimization task in the most general form, thereby avoiding the unrealistic simplifications adopted by previous methods. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach effectively captures complex relationships in discrete data.