Age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) provide the most extensive record of reproductive change, but their aggregate nature obscures the individual-level behavioral mechanisms that drive fertility trends. To bridge this micro-macro divide, we introduce a likelihood-free Bayesian framework that couples a demographically interpretable, individual-level simulation model of the reproductive process with Sequential Neural Posterior Estimation (SNPE). We show that this framework successfully recovers core behavioral parameters governing contemporary fertility, including preferences for family size, reproductive timing, and contraceptive failure, using only ASFRs. The framework's effectiveness is validated on cohorts from four countries with diverse fertility regimes. Most compellingly, the model, estimated solely on aggregate data, successfully predicts out-of-sample distributions of individual-level outcomes, including age at first sex, desired family size, and birth intervals. Because our framework yields complete synthetic life histories, it significantly reduces the data requirements for building microsimulation models and enables behaviorally explicit demographic forecasts.

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled framework for decision-making in partially observable environments, which can be modeled as Markov decision processes and compactly represented through dynamic decision Bayesian networks. Recent advances demonstrate that inference on sparse Bayesian networks can be accelerated using quantum rejection sampling combined with amplitude amplification, leading to a computational speedup in estimating acceptance probabilities.\\ Building on this result, we introduce Quantum Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (QBRL), a hybrid quantum-classical look-ahead algorithm for model-based RL in partially observable environments. We present a rigorous, oracle-free time complexity analysis under fault-tolerant assumptions for the quantum device. Unlike standard treatments that assume a black-box oracle, we explicitly specify the inference process, allowing our bounds to more accurately reflect the true computational cost. We show that, for environments whose dynamics form a sparse Bayesian network, horizon-based near-optimal planning can be achieved sub-quadratically faster through quantum-enhanced belief updates. Furthermore, we present numerical experiments benchmarking QBRL against its classical counterpart on simple yet illustrative decision-making tasks. Our results offer a detailed analysis of how the quantum computational advantage translates into decision-making performance, highlighting that the magnitude of the advantage can vary significantly across different deployment settings.

Adversarial attacks in 3D environments have emerged as a critical threat to the reliability of visual perception systems, particularly in safety-sensitive applications such as identity verification and autonomous driving. These attacks employ adversarial patches and 3D objects to manipulate deep neural network (DNN) predictions by exploiting vulnerabilities within complex scenes. Existing defense mechanisms, such as adversarial training and purification, primarily employ passive strategies to enhance robustness. However, these approaches often rely on pre-defined assumptions about adversarial tactics, limiting their adaptability in dynamic 3D settings. To address these challenges, we introduce Reinforced Embodied Active Defense (Rein-EAD), a proactive defense framework that leverages adaptive exploration and interaction with the environment to improve perception robustness in 3D adversarial contexts. By implementing a multi-step objective that balances immediate prediction accuracy with predictive entropy minimization, Rein-EAD optimizes defense strategies over a multi-step horizon. Additionally, Rein-EAD involves an uncertainty-oriented reward-shaping mechanism that facilitates efficient policy updates, thereby reducing computational overhead and supporting real-world applicability without the need for differentiable environments. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of Rein-EAD, demonstrating a substantial reduction in attack success rates while preserving standard accuracy across diverse tasks. Notably, Rein-EAD exhibits robust generalization to unseen and adaptive attacks, making it suitable for real-world complex tasks, including 3D object classification, face recognition and autonomous driving.

In Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRS), a user provides feedback on recommended items at each turn, leading the CRS towards improved recommendations. Due to the need for a large amount of data, a user simulator is employed for both training and evaluation. Such user simulators critique the current retrieved item based on knowledge of a single target item. However, system evaluation in offline settings with simulators is limited by the focus on a single target item and their unlimited patience over a large number of turns. To overcome these limitations of existing simulators, we propose Fashion-AlterEval, a new dataset that contains human judgments for a selection of alternative items by adding new annotations in common fashion CRS datasets. Consequently, we propose two novel meta-user simulators that use the collected judgments and allow simulated users not only to express their preferences about alternative items to their original target, but also to change their mind and level of patience. In our experiments using the Shoes and Fashion IQ as the original datasets and three CRS models, we find that using the knowledge of alternatives by the simulator can have a considerable impact on the evaluation of existing CRS models, specifically that the existing single-target evaluation underestimates their effectiveness, and when simulatedusers are allowed to instead consider alternative relevant items, the system can rapidly respond to more quickly satisfy the user.

This research addresses the critical lack of comprehensive studies on feature scaling by systematically evaluating 12 scaling techniques - including several less common transformations - across 14 different Machine Learning algorithms and 16 datasets for classification and regression tasks. We meticulously analyzed impacts on predictive performance (using metrics such as accuracy, MAE, MSE, and $R^2$) and computational costs (training time, inference time, and memory usage). Key findings reveal that while ensemble methods (such as Random Forest and gradient boosting models like XGBoost, CatBoost and LightGBM) demonstrate robust performance largely independent of scaling, other widely used models such as Logistic Regression, SVMs, TabNet, and MLPs show significant performance variations highly dependent on the chosen scaler. This extensive empirical analysis, with all source code, experimental results, and model parameters made publicly available to ensure complete transparency and reproducibility, offers model-specific crucial guidance to practitioners on the need for an optimal selection of feature scaling techniques.

We present a novel approach to help decision-makers efficiently identify preferred solutions from the Pareto set of a multi-objective optimization problem. Our method uses a Bayesian model to estimate the decision-maker's utility function based on pairwise comparisons. Aided by this model, a principled elicitation strategy selects queries interactively to balance exploration and exploitation, guiding the discovery of high-utility solutions. The approach is flexible: it can be used interactively or a posteriori after estimating the Pareto front through standard multi-objective optimization techniques. Additionally, at the end of the elicitation phase, it generates a reduced menu of high-quality solutions, simplifying the decision-making process. Through experiments on test problems with up to nine objectives, our method demonstrates superior performance in finding high-utility solutions with a small number of queries. We also provide an open-source implementation of our method to support its adoption by the broader community.

Inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) play a crucial role in various fields, including computational science, image processing, and engineering. Particularly, Darcy flow equation is a fundamental equation in fluid mechanics, which plays a crucial role in understanding fluid flow through porous media. Bayesian methods provide an effective approach for solving PDEs inverse problems, while their numerical implementation requires numerous evaluations of computationally expensive forward solvers. Therefore, the adoption of surrogate models with lower computational costs is essential. However, constructing a globally accurate surrogate model for high-dimensional complex problems demands high model capacity and large amounts of data. To address this challenge, this study proposes an efficient locally accurate surrogate that focuses on the high-probability regions of the true likelihood in inverse problems, with relatively low model complexity and few training data requirements. Additionally, we introduce a sequential Bayesian design strategy to acquire the proposed surrogate since the high-probability region of the likelihood is unknown. The strategy treats the posterior evolution process of sequential Bayesian design as a Gaussian process, enabling algorithmic acceleration through one-step ahead prior. The complete algorithmic framework is referred to as Sequential Bayesian design for locally accurate surrogate (SBD-LAS). Finally, three experiments based the Darcy flow equation demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method in terms of both inversion accuracy and computational speed.

Previous studies have shown that hazard ratios between treatment groups estimated with the Cox model are uninterpretable because the indefinite baseline hazard of the model fails to identify temporal change in the risk set composition due to treatment assignment and unobserved factors among multiple, contradictory scenarios. To alleviate this problem, especially in studies based on observational data with uncontrolled dynamic treatment and real-time measurement of many covariates, we propose abandoning the baseline hazard and using machine learning to explicitly model the change in the risk set with or without latent variables. For this framework, we clarify the context in which hazard ratios can be causally interpreted, and then develop a method based on Neyman orthogonality to compute debiased maximum-likelihood estimators of hazard ratios. Computing the constructed estimators is more efficient than computing those based on weighted regression with marginal structural Cox models. Numerical simulations confirm that the proposed method identifies the ground truth with minimal bias. These results lay the foundation for developing a useful, alternative method for causal inference with uncontrolled, observational data in modern epidemiology.

The preparation of quantum Gibbs states is a fundamental challenge in quantum computing, essential for applications ranging from modeling open quantum systems to quantum machine learning. Building on the Meta-Variational Quantum Eigensolver framework proposed by Cervera-Lierta et al.(2021) and a problem driven ansatz design, we introduce two meta-learning algorithms: Meta-Variational Quantum Thermalizer (Meta-VQT) and Neural Network Meta-VQT (NN-Meta VQT) for efficient thermal state preparation of parametrized Hamiltonians on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Meta-VQT utilizes a fully quantum ansatz, while NN Meta-VQT integrates a quantum classical hybrid architecture. Both leverage collective optimization over training sets to generalize Gibbs state preparation to unseen parameters. We validate our methods on upto 8-qubit Transverse Field Ising Model and the 2-qubit Heisenberg model with all field terms, demonstrating efficient thermal state generation beyond training data. For larger systems, we show that our meta-learned parameters when combined with appropriately designed ansatz serve as warm start initializations, significantly outperforming random initializations in the optimization tasks. Furthermore, a 3- qubit Kitaev ring example showcases our algorithm's effectiveness across finite-temperature crossover regimes. Finally, we apply our algorithms to train a Quantum Boltzmann Machine (QBM) on a 2-qubit Heisenberg model with all field terms, achieving enhanced training efficiency, improved Gibbs state accuracy, and a 30-fold runtime speedup over existing techniques such as variational quantum imaginary time (VarQITE)-based QBM highlighting the scalability and practicality of meta-algorithm-based QBMs.

Most existing methods for adapting models to out-of-distribution (OOD) domains rely on invariant representation learning to eliminate the influence of biased features. However, should bias always be eliminated -- and if not, when should it be retained, and how can it be leveraged? To address these questions, we first present a theoretical analysis that explores the conditions under which biased features can be identified and effectively utilized. Building on this theoretical foundation, we introduce a novel framework that strategically leverages bias to complement invariant representations during inference. The framework comprises two key components that leverage bias in both direct and indirect ways: (1) using invariance as guidance to extract predictive ingredients from bias, and (2) exploiting identified bias to estimate the environmental condition and then use it to explore appropriate bias-aware predictors to alleviate environment gaps. We validate our approach through experiments on both synthetic datasets and standard domain generalization benchmarks. Results consistently demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches, underscoring its robustness and adaptability.