Learning Graphical Models
Hierarchical Bayesian Operator-induced Symbolic Regression Trees for Structural Learning of Scientific Expressions
Roy, Somjit, Dey, Pritam, Pati, Debdeep, Mallick, Bani K.
The advent of Scientific Machine Learning has heralded a transformative era in scientific discovery, driving progress across diverse domains. Central to this progress is uncovering scientific laws from experimental data through symbolic regression. However, existing approaches are dominated by heuristic algorithms or data-hungry black-box methods, which often demand low-noise settings and lack principled uncertainty quantification. Motivated by interpretable Statistical Artificial Intelligence, we develop a hierarchical Bayesian framework for symbolic regression that represents scientific laws as ensembles of tree-structured symbolic expressions endowed with a regularized tree prior. This coherent probabilistic formulation enables full posterior inference via an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, yielding a balance between predictive accuracy and structural parsimony. To guide symbolic model selection, we develop a marginal posterior-based criterion adhering to the Occam's window principle and further quantify structural fidelity to ground truth through a tailored expression-distance metric. On the theoretical front, we establish near-minimax rate of Bayesian posterior concentration, providing the first rigorous guarantee in context of symbolic regression. Empirical evaluation demonstrates robust performance of our proposed methodology against state-of-the-art competing modules on a simulated example, a suite of canonical Feynman equations, and single-atom catalysis dataset.
Uncertainty Quantification of Large Language Models using Approximate Bayesian Computation
Sharma, Mridul, Patel, Adeetya, Souza, Zaneta D', Rahimi, Samira Abbasgholizadeh, Reddy, Siva, Madathil, Sreenath
Despite their widespread applications, Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to express uncertainty, posing a challenge for reliable deployment in high stakes and safety critical domains like clinical diagnostics. Existing standard baseline methods such as model logits and elicited probabilities produce overconfident and poorly calibrated estimates. In this work, we propose Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC), a likelihood-free Bayesian inference, based approach that treats LLMs as a stochastic simulator to infer posterior distributions over predictive probabilities. We evaluate our ABC approach on two clinically relevant benchmarks: a synthetic oral lesion diagnosis dataset and the publicly available GretelAI symptom-to-diagnosis dataset. Compared to standard baselines, our approach improves accuracy by up to 46.9\%, reduces Brier scores by 74.4\%, and enhances calibration as measured by Expected Calibration Error (ECE) and predictive entropy.
Adaptive Event-Triggered Policy Gradient for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Siddique, Umer, Sinha, Abhinav, Cao, Yongcan
Conventional multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods rely on time-triggered execution, where agents sample and communicate actions at fixed intervals. This approach is often computationally expensive and communication-intensive. To address this limitation, we propose ET-MAPG (Event-Triggered Multi-Agent Policy Gradient reinforcement learning), a framework that jointly learns an agent's control policy and its event-triggering policy. Unlike prior work that decouples these mechanisms, ET-MAPG integrates them into a unified learning process, enabling agents to learn not only what action to take but also when to execute it. For scenarios with inter-agent communication, we introduce AET-MAPG, an attention-based variant that leverages a self-attention mechanism to learn selective communication patterns. AET-MAPG empowers agents to determine not only when to trigger an action but also with whom to communicate and what information to exchange, thereby optimizing coordination. Both methods can be integrated with any policy gradient MARL algorithm. Extensive experiments across diverse MARL benchmarks demonstrate that our approaches achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art, time-triggered baselines while significantly reducing both computational load and communication overhead.
Design Insights and Comparative Evaluation of a Hardware-Based Cooperative Perception Architecture for Lane Change Prediction
Manzour, Mohamed, Elias, Catherine M., Shehata, Omar M., Izquierdo, Rubén, Sotelo, Miguel Ángel
Traffic accidents remain a major global concern, with lane-change maneuvers recognized as one of the significant contributors to collision risk. Anticipating these maneuvers has become an important research focus, supporting both traffic safety and the safe integration of autonomous and assisted driving technologies. Over the past decade, numerous models have been developed for lane-change prediction. However, most existing works have been designed and validated using simulation environments or pre-recorded datasets. While these settings allow for benchmarking and controlled evaluation, they often rely on simplified assumptions about sensing, communication, and vehicle behavior that do not fully capture the complexity of real-world operation. Real-world deployments of lane-change prediction systems are relatively rare, and when they are reported, their practical challenges, limitations, and insights remain under-documented. To illustrate the setting more concretely, consider the left lane change scenario shown in Figure 1. The Ego Vehicle (EV) is driving in the left lane, while the Target Vehicle (TV) is moving in the right lane behind a Preceding Vehicle (PV). When the PV suddenly brakes, the TV must change lanes to avoid a collision.
Emergent Risk Awareness in Rational Agents under Resource Constraints
Ornia, Daniel Jarne, Bishop, Nicholas, Dyer, Joel, Lee, Wei-Chen, Calinescu, Ani, Farmer, Doyne, Wooldridge, Michael
Advanced reasoning models with agentic capabilities (AI agents) are deployed to interact with humans and to solve sequential decision-making problems under (approximate) utility functions and internal models. When such problems have resource or failure constraints where action sequences may be forcibly terminated once resources are exhausted, agents face implicit trade-offs that reshape their utility-driven (rational) behaviour. Additionally, since these agents are typically commissioned by a human principal to act on their behalf, asymmetries in constraint exposure can give rise to previously unanticipated misalignment between human objectives and agent incentives. We formalise this setting through a survival bandit framework, provide theoretical and empirical results that quantify the impact of survival-driven preference shifts, identify conditions under which misalignment emerges and propose mechanisms to mitigate the emergence of risk-seeking or risk-averse behaviours. As a result, this work aims to increase understanding and interpretability of emergent behaviours of AI agents operating under such survival pressure, and offer guidelines for safely deploying such AI systems in critical resource-limited environments.
Uncertainty-aware Latent Safety Filters for Avoiding Out-of-Distribution Failures
Seo, Junwon, Nakamura, Kensuke, Bajcsy, Andrea
Recent advances in generative world models have enabled classical safe control methods, such as Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability, to generalize to complex robotic systems operating directly from high-dimensional sensor observations. However, obtaining comprehensive coverage of all safety-critical scenarios during world model training is extremely challenging. As a result, latent safety filters built on top of these models may miss novel hazards and even fail to prevent known ones, overconfidently misclassifying risky out-of-distribution (OOD) situations as safe. To address this, we introduce an uncertainty-aware latent safety filter that proactively steers robots away from both known and unseen failures. Our key idea is to use the world model's epistemic uncertainty as a proxy for identifying unseen potential hazards. We propose a principled method to detect OOD world model predictions by calibrating an uncertainty threshold via conformal prediction. By performing reachability analysis in an augmented state space-spanning both the latent representation and the epistemic uncertainty-we synthesize a latent safety filter that can reliably safeguard arbitrary policies from both known and unseen safety hazards. In simulation and hardware experiments on vision-based control tasks with a Franka manipulator, we show that our uncertainty-aware safety filter preemptively detects potential unsafe scenarios and reliably proposes safe, in-distribution actions. Video results can be found on the project website at https://cmu-intentlab.github.io/UNISafe
Lidar-based Tracking of Traffic Participants with Sensor Nodes in Existing Urban Infrastructure
Schäfer, Simon, Alrifaee, Bassam, Hashemi, Ehsan
This paper presents a lidar-only state estimation and tracking framework, along with a roadside sensing unit for integration with existing urban infrastructure. Urban deployments demand scalable, real-time tracking solutions, yet traditional remote sensing remains costly and computationally intensive, especially under perceptually degraded conditions. Our sensor node couples a single lidar with an edge computing unit and runs a computationally efficient, GPU-free observer that simultaneously estimates object state, class, dimensions, and existence probability. The pipeline performs: (i) state updates via an extended Kalman filter, (ii) dimension estimation using a 1D grid-map/Bayesian update, (iii) class updates via a lookup table driven by the most probable footprint, and (iv) existence estimation from track age and bounding-box consistency. Experiments in dynamic urban-like scenes with diverse traffic participants demonstrate real-time performance and high precision: The complete end-to-end pipeline finishes within \SI{100}{\milli\second} for \SI{99.88}{\%} of messages, with an excellent detection rate. Robustness is further confirmed under simulated wind and sensor vibration. These results indicate that reliable, real-time roadside tracking is feasible on CPU-only edge hardware, enabling scalable, privacy-friendly deployments within existing city infrastructure. The framework integrates with existing poles, traffic lights, and buildings, reducing deployment costs and simplifying large-scale urban rollouts and maintenance efforts.