Learning Graphical Models
Improving Out-of-Distribution Detection with Markov Logic Networks
Kirchheim, Konstantin, Ortmeier, Frank
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for ensuring the reliability of deep learning models operating in open-world scenarios. Current OOD detectors mainly rely on statistical models to identify unusual patterns in the latent representations of a deep neural network. This work proposes to augment existing OOD detectors with probabilistic reasoning, utilizing Markov logic networks (MLNs). MLNs connect first-order logic with probabilistic reasoning to assign probabilities to inputs based on weighted logical constraints defined over human-understandable concepts, which offers improved explainability. Through extensive experiments on multiple datasets, we demonstrate that MLNs can significantly enhance the performance of a wide range of existing OOD detectors while maintaining computational efficiency. Furthermore, we introduce a simple algorithm for learning logical constraints for OOD detection from a dataset and showcase its effectiveness.
Offline Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning via Score Decomposition
Qiao, Dan, Li, Wenhao, Yang, Shanchao, Zha, Hongyuan, Wang, Baoxiang
Offline cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) faces unique challenges due to distributional shifts, particularly stemming from the high dimensionality of joint action spaces and the presence of out-of-distribution joint action selections. In this work, we highlight that a fundamental challenge in offline MARL arises from the multi-equilibrium nature of cooperative tasks, which induces a highly multimodal joint behavior policy space coupled with heterogeneous-quality behavior data. This makes it difficult for individual policy regularization to align with a consistent coordination pattern, leading to the policy distribution shift problems. To tackle this challenge, we design a sequential score function decomposition method that distills per-agent regularization signals from the joint behavior policy, which induces coordinated modality selection under decentralized execution constraints. Then we leverage a flexible diffusion-based generative model to learn these score functions from multimodal offline data, and integrate them into joint-action critics to guide policy updates toward high-reward, in-distribution regions under a shared team reward. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple particle environments and Multi-agent MuJoCo benchmarks consistently. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explicitly address the distributional gap between offline and online MARL, paving the way for more generalizable offline policy-based MARL methods.
Towards a Multi-Agent Simulation of Cyber-attackers and Cyber-defenders Battles
Soulé, Julien, Jamont, Jean-Paul, Occello, Michel, Théron, Paul, Traonouez, Louis-Marie
As cyber-attacks show to be more and more complex and coordinated, cyber-defenders strategy through multi-agent approaches could be key to tackle against cyber-attacks as close as entry points in a networked system. This paper presents a Markovian modeling and implementation through a simulator of fighting cyber-attacker agents and cyber-defender agents deployed on host network nodes. It aims to provide an experimental framework to implement realistically based coordinated cyber-attack scenarios while assessing cyber-defenders dynamic organizations. We abstracted network nodes by sets of properties including agents' ones. Actions applied by agents model how the network reacts depending in a given state and what properties are to change. Collective choice of the actions brings the whole environment closer or farther from respective cyber-attackers and cyber-defenders goals. Using the simulator, we implemented a realistically inspired scenario with several behavior implementation approaches for cyber-defenders and cyber-attackers.
Enhanced Drought Analysis in Bangladesh: A Machine Learning Approach for Severity Classification Using Satellite Data
Paul, Tonmoy, Mati, Mrittika Devi, Islam, Md. Mahmudul
Drought poses a pervasive environmental challenge in Bangladesh, impacting agriculture, socio-economic stability, and food security due to its unique geographic and anthropogenic vulnerabilities. Traditional drought indices, such as the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), often overlook crucial factors like soil moisture and temperature, limiting their resolution. Moreover, current machine learning models applied to drought prediction have been underexplored in the context of Bangladesh, lacking a comprehensive integration of satellite data across multiple districts. To address these gaps, we propose a satellite data-driven machine learning framework to classify drought across 38 districts of Bangladesh. Using unsupervised algorithms like K-means and Bayesian Gaussian Mixture for clustering, followed by classification models such as KNN, Random Forest, Decision Tree, and Naive Bayes, the framework integrates weather data (humidity, soil moisture, temperature) from 2012-2024. This approach successfully classifies drought severity into different levels. However, it shows significant variabilities in drought vulnerabilities across regions which highlights the aptitude of machine learning models in terms of identifying and predicting drought conditions.
Exploring bidirectional bounds for minimax-training of Energy-based models
Geng, Cong, Wang, Jia, Chen, Li, Gao, Zhiyong, Frellsen, Jes, Hauberg, Søren
Energy-based models (EBMs) estimate unnormalized densities in an elegant framework, but they are generally difficult to train. Recent work has linked EBMs to generative adversarial networks, by noting that they can be trained through a minimax game using a variational lower bound. To avoid the instabilities caused by minimizing a lower bound, we propose to instead work with bidirectional bounds, meaning that we maximize a lower bound and minimize an upper bound when training the EBM. We investigate four different bounds on the log-likelihood derived from different perspectives. We derive lower bounds based on the singular values of the generator Jacobian and on mutual information. To upper bound the negative log-likelihood, we consider a gradient penalty-like bound, as well as one based on diffusion processes. In all cases, we provide algorithms for evaluating the bounds. We compare the different bounds to investigate, the pros and cons of the different approaches. Finally, we demonstrate that the use of bidirectional bounds stabilizes EBM training and yields high-quality density estimation and sample generation.
Improved Uncertainty Quantification in Physics-Informed Neural Networks Using Error Bounds and Solution Bundles
Flores, Pablo, Graf, Olga, Protopapas, Pavlos, Pichara, Karim
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have been widely used to obtain solutions to various physical phenomena modeled as Differential Equations. As PINNs are not naturally equipped with mechanisms for Uncertainty Quantification, some work has been done to quantify the different uncertainties that arise when dealing with PINNs. In this paper, we use a two-step procedure to train Bayesian Neural Networks that provide uncertainties over the solutions to differential equation systems provided by PINNs. We use available error bounds over PINNs to formulate a heteroscedastic variance that improves the uncertainty estimation. Furthermore, we solve forward problems and utilize the obtained uncertainties when doing parameter estimation in inverse problems in cosmology.
Training Cross-Morphology Embodied AI Agents: From Practical Challenges to Theoretical Foundations
Liu, Shaoshan, Wang, Fan, Zhou, Hongjun, Wang, Yuanfeng
While theory and practice are often seen as separate domains, this article shows that theoretical insight is essential for overcoming real-world engineering barriers. We begin with a practical challenge: training a cross-morphology embodied AI policy that generalizes across diverse robot morphologies. We formalize this as the Heterogeneous Embodied Agent Training (HEAT) problem and prove it reduces to a structured Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) that is PSPACE-complete. This result explains why current reinforcement learning pipelines break down under morphological diversity, due to sequential training constraints, memory-policy coupling, and data incompatibility. We further explore Collective Adaptation, a distributed learning alternative inspired by biological systems. Though NEXP-complete in theory, it offers meaningful scalability and deployment benefits in practice. This work illustrates how computational theory can illuminate system design trade-offs and guide the development of more robust, scalable embodied AI. For practitioners and researchers to explore this problem, the implementation code of this work has been made publicly available at https://github.com/airs-admin/HEAT
Bayes Error Rate Estimation in Difficult Situations
Wheat, Lesley, Mohrenschildt, Martin v., Habibi, Saeid
The Bayes Error Rate (BER) is the fundamental limit on the achievable generalizable classification accuracy of any machine learning model due to inherent uncertainty within the data. BER estimators offer insight into the difficulty of any classification problem and set expectations for optimal classification performance. In order to be useful, the estimators must also be accurate with a limited number of samples on multivariate problems with unknown class distributions. To determine which estimators meet the minimum requirements for "usefulness", an in-depth examination of their accuracy is conducted using Monte Carlo simulations with synthetic data in order to obtain their confidence bounds for binary classification. To examine the usability of the estimators on real-world applications, new test scenarios are introduced upon which 2500 Monte Carlo simulations per scenario are run over a wide range of BER values. In a comparison of k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN), Generalized Henze-Penrose (GHP) divergence and Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) techniques, results show that kNN is overwhelmingly the more accurate non-parametric estimator. In order to reach the target of an under 5 percent range for the 95 percent confidence bounds, the minimum number of required samples per class is 1000. As more features are added, more samples are needed, so that 2500 samples per class are required at only 4 features. Other estimators do become more accurate than kNN as more features are added, but continuously fail to meet the target range.
A kernel conditional two-sample test
Massiani, Pierre-François, Fiedler, Christian, Haverbeck, Lukas, Solowjow, Friedrich, Trimpe, Sebastian
We propose a framework for hypothesis testing on conditional probability distributions, which we then use to construct conditional two-sample statistical tests. These tests identify the inputs -- called covariates in this context -- where two conditional expectations differ with high probability. Our key idea is to transform confidence bounds of a learning method into a conditional two-sample test, and we instantiate this principle for kernel ridge regression (KRR) and conditional kernel mean embeddings. We generalize existing pointwise-in-time or time-uniform confidence bounds for KRR to previously-inaccessible yet essential cases such as infinite-dimensional outputs with non-trace-class kernels. These bounds enable circumventing the need for independent data in our statistical tests, since they allow online sampling. We also introduce bootstrapping schemes leveraging the parametric form of testing thresholds identified in theory to avoid tuning inaccessible parameters, making our method readily applicable in practice. Such conditional two-sample tests are especially relevant in applications where data arrive sequentially or non-independently, or when output distributions vary with operational parameters. We demonstrate their utility through examples in process monitoring and comparison of dynamical systems. Overall, our results establish a comprehensive foundation for conditional two-sample testing, from theoretical guarantees to practical implementation, and advance the state-of-the-art on the concentration of vector-valued least squares estimation.
Position: There Is No Free Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification
Melev, Ivan, Kauermann, Goeran
Due to their intuitive appeal, Bayesian methods of modeling and uncertainty quantification have become popular in modern machine and deep learning. When providing a prior distribution over the parameter space, it is straightforward to obtain a distribution over the parameters that is conventionally interpreted as uncertainty quantification of the model. We challenge the validity of such Bayesian uncertainty quantification by discussing the equivalent optimization-based representation of Bayesian updating, provide an alternative interpretation that is coherent with the optimization-based perspective, propose measures of the quality of the Bayesian inferential stage, and suggest directions for future work.