Modern causal discovery methods face critical limitations in scalability, computational efficiency, and adaptability to mixed data types, as evidenced by benchmarks on node scalability (30, $\le 50$, $\ge 70$ nodes), computational energy demands, and continuous/non-continuous data handling. While traditional algorithms like PC, GES, and ICA-LiNGAM struggle with these challenges, exhibiting prohibitive energy costs for higher-order nodes and poor scalability beyond 70 nodes, we propose \textbf{GUIDE}, a framework that integrates Large Language Model (LLM)-generated adjacency matrices with observational data through a dual-encoder architecture. GUIDE uniquely optimizes computational efficiency, reducing runtime on average by $\approx 42%$ compared to RL-BIC and KCRL methods, while achieving an average $\approx 117%$ improvement in accuracy over both NOTEARS and GraN-DAG individually. During training, GUIDE's reinforcement learning agent dynamically balances reward maximization (accuracy) and penalty avoidance (DAG constraints), enabling robust performance across mixed data types and scalability to $\ge 70$ nodes -- a setting where baseline methods fail.

Abstract--Advancements in tools like Shapely 2.0 and Triton can significantly improve the efficiency of spatial similarity computations by enabling faster and more scalable geometric operations [1], [2]. However, for extremely large datasets, these optimizations may face challenges due to the sheer volume of computations required. T o address this, we propose a framework that reduces the number of clusters requiring verification, thereby decreasing the computational load on these systems. The framework integrates dynamic similarity index thresholding, supervised scheduling [3], and recall-constrained optimization to efficiently identify clusters with the highest spatial similarity while meeting user-defined precision and recall requirements [4]. By leveraging Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) to dynamically determine similarity thresholds [5] and machine learning models to prioritize clusters, our approach achieves substantial reductions in computational cost without sacrificing accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of the method, offering a practical solution for large-scale geospatial analysis. Geospatial data constitutes the cornerstone of numerous applications across various domains, including urban planning, environmental monitoring, infrastructure development, and medicine. For example, OpenStreetMap contains global data amounting to over 1.5 terabytes [6], while GeoNames describes more than 12 million locations, providing extensive point geometries such as latitude and longitude [7]. Expanding these datasets, geospatial knowledge graphs like Y AGO2geo integrate millions of lines, polygons, and multi-polygons from OpenStreetMap and administrative divisions [8], while WorldKG represents around 113.4 million geographic entities [9]. KnowWhereGraph, a more recent initiative, comprises over 12 billion RDF triples, including data on polygons and multipolygons, and supports applications in disaster relief, agricultural land use, and food-related supply chains [10]. Even cross-domain knowledge graphs such as DBpedia and Wikidata incorporate a substantial amount of geospatial information, underscoring the critical role of spatial data on the Web. Beyond these well-known repositories, spatial datasets also play a transformative role in medicine, particularly in the analysis and modeling of organ structures. For instance, the Visible Human Project provides high-resolution spatial data for anatomical structures [11], while the Human Connectome Project captures detailed spatial relationships within the brain [12].

Visual modality is the most vulnerable to privacy leakage in real-world multimodal applications like autonomous driving with visual and radar data; Machine unlearning removes specific training data from pre-trained models to address privacy leakage, however, existing methods fail to preserve cross-modal knowledge and maintain intra-class structural stability of retain data, leading to reduced overall and other modalities' performance during visual unlearning; to address these challenges, we propose a Cross-modal Contrastive Unlearning (CCU) framework, which integrates three key components: (a) selective visual unlearning: employing inverse contrastive learning to dissociate visual representations from their original semantics, (b) cross-modal knowledge retention: preserving other modalities' discriminability through semantic consistency, and (c) dual-set contrastive separation: preserving the model performance via isolation of structural perturbations between the unlearn set and retain set; extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the superiority of CCU, and our method achieves a 7.12% accuracy improvement with only 7% of the unlearning time compared to the top-accuracy baseline.

Interpretable risk scores play a vital role in clinical decision support, yet traditional methods for deriving such scores often rely on manual preprocessing, task-specific modeling, and simplified assumptions that limit their flexibility and predictive power. We present SHAPoint, a novel, task-agnostic framework that integrates the predictive accuracy of gradient boosted trees with the interpretability of point-based risk scores. SHAPoint supports classification, regression, and survival tasks, while also inheriting valuable properties from tree-based models, such as native handling of missing data and support for monotonic constraints. Compared to existing frameworks, SHAPoint offers superior flexibility, reduced reliance on manual preprocessing, and faster runtime performance. Empirical results show that SHAPoint produces compact and interpretable scores with predictive performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods, but at a fraction of the runtime, making it a powerful tool for transparent and scalable risk stratification.

Post-hoc calibration methods are widely used to improve the reliability of probabilistic predictions from machine learning models. Despite their prevalence, a comprehensive theoretical understanding of these methods remains elusive, particularly regarding their performance across different datasets and model architectures. Input features play a crucial role in shaping model predictions and, consequently, their calibration. However, the interplay between feature quality and calibration performance has not been thoroughly investigated. In this work, we present a rigorous theoretical analysis of post-hoc calibration methods, focusing on Platt scaling and isotonic regression. We derive convergence guarantees, computational complexity bounds, and finite-sample performance metrics for these methods. Furthermore, we explore the impact of feature informativeness on calibration performance through controlled synthetic experiments. Our empirical evaluation spans a diverse set of real-world datasets and model architectures, demonstrating consistent improvements in calibration metrics across various scenarios. By examining calibration performance under varying feature conditions utilizing only informative features versus complete feature spaces including noise dimensions, we provide fundamental insights into the robustness and reliability of different calibration approaches. Our findings offer practical guidelines for selecting appropriate calibration methods based on dataset characteristics and computational constraints, bridging the gap between theoretical understanding and practical implementation in uncertainty quantification. Code and experimental data are available at: https://github.com/Ajwebdevs/calibration-analysis-experiments.

Learning causal structure from observational data is central to scientific modeling and decision-making. Constraint-based methods aim to recover conditional independence (CI) relations in a causal directed acyclic graph (DAG). Classical approaches such as PC and subsequent methods orient v-structures first and then propagate edge directions from these seeds, assuming perfect CI tests and exhaustive search of separating subsets -- assumptions often violated in practice, leading to cascading errors in the final graph. Recent work has explored using large language models (LLMs) as experts, prompting sets of nodes for edge directions, and could augment edge orientation when assumptions are not met. However, such methods implicitly assume perfect experts, which is unrealistic for hallucination-prone LLMs. We propose MosaCD, a causal discovery method that propagates edges from a high-confidence set of seeds derived from both CI tests and LLM annotations. To filter hallucinations, we introduce shuffled queries that exploit LLMs' positional bias, retaining only high-confidence seeds. We then apply a novel confidence-down propagation strategy that orients the most reliable edges first, and can be integrated with any skeleton-based discovery method. Across multiple real-world graphs, MosaCD achieves higher accuracy in final graph construction than existing constraint-based methods, largely due to the improved reliability of initial seeds and robust propagation strategies.

Considering higher-order interactions allows for a more comprehensive understanding of network structures beyond simple pairwise connections. While leveraging all cliques in a network to handle higher-order interactions is intuitive, it often leads to computational inefficiencies due to overlapping information between higher-order and lower-order cliques. To address this issue, we propose an augmented maximal clique strategy. Although using only maximal cliques can reduce unnecessary overlap and provide a concise representation of the network, certain nodes may still appear in multiple maximal cliques, resulting in imbalanced training data. Therefore, our augmented maximal clique approach selectively includes some non-maximal cliques to mitigate the overrepresentation of specific nodes and promote more balanced learning across the network. Comparative analyses on synthetic networks and real-world citation datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms approaches based on pairwise interactions, all cliques, or only maximal cliques. Finally, by integrating this strategy into GNN-based semi-supervised learning, we establish a link between maximal clique-based methods and GNNs, showing that incorporating higher-order structures improves predictive accuracy. As a result, the augmented maximal clique strategy offers a computationally efficient and effective solution for higher-order network learning.

Item difficulty plays a crucial role in test performance, interpretability of scores, and equity for all test-takers, especially in large-scale assessments. Traditional approaches to item difficulty modeling rely on field testing and classical test theory (CTT)-based item analysis or item response theory (IRT) calibration, which can be time-consuming and costly. To overcome these challenges, text-based approaches leveraging machine learning and language models, have emerged as promising alternatives. This paper reviews and synthesizes 37 articles on automated item difficulty prediction in large-scale assessment settings published through May 2025. For each study, we delineate the dataset, difficulty parameter, subject domain, item type, number of items, training and test data split, input, features, model, evaluation criteria, and model performance outcomes. Results showed that although classic machine learning models remain relevant due to their interpretability, state-of-the-art language models, using both small and large transformer-based architectures, can capture syntactic and semantic patterns without the need for manual feature engineering. Uniquely, model performance outcomes were summarized to serve as a benchmark for future research and overall, text-based methods have the potential to predict item difficulty with root mean square error (RMSE) as low as 0.165, Pearson correlation as high as 0.87, and accuracy as high as 0.806. The review concludes by discussing implications for practice and outlining future research directions for automated item difficulty modeling.

Recent work has demonstrated that controlled pretraining experiments are a powerful tool for understanding learning, reasoning, and memorization in large language models (LLMs). However, the computational cost of pretraining presents a significant constraint. To overcome this constraint, we propose to conduct multiple pretraining experiments simultaneously during a single training run. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by conducting ten experiments during the training of a 1.5B parameter model on 210B tokens. Although we only train a single model, we can replicate the results from multiple previous works on data contamination, poisoning, and memorization. We also conduct novel investigations into knowledge acquisition, mathematical reasoning, and watermarking. For example, we dynamically update the training data until the model acquires a particular piece of knowledge. Remarkably, the influence of the ten experiments on the model's training dynamics and overall performance is minimal. However, interactions between different experiments may act as a potential confounder in our approach. We propose to test for interactions with continual pretraining experiments, finding them to be negligible in our setup. Overall, our findings suggest that performing multiple pretraining experiments in a single training run can enable rigorous scientific experimentation with large models on a compute budget.

We introduce Guard Vector, a safety task vector computed as the parameter difference between a guardrail model (Guard Model) and a same-architecture pretrained language model. Composing this vector with a target language model yields a Target Guard Model (TGM). We then adapt TGM with a streaming-aware approach that combines prefix-based training and evaluation with a classifier that produces a single-token output. With this composition alone, TGM improves classification quality over established Guard Models across standard safety suites and enables language extensibility to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, requiring neither additional training nor target language labels. It also demonstrates model portability across two widely used public guardrail backbones, Llama and Gemma. With prefix SFT (supervised fine-tuning), TGM preserves classification quality under streaming by aligning the behavior between prefix inputs and full-text inputs. The single-token output design increases throughput and reduces latency. Together, these components reduce data and compute requirements while promoting streaming-aware evaluation practices, thereby contributing to a more responsible AI ecosystem.