Statistical Learning
From Samples to Scenarios: A New Paradigm for Probabilistic Forecasting
Dai, Xilin, Xu, Zhijian, Cai, Wanxu, Xu, Qiang
Most state-of-the-art probabilistic time series forecasting models rely on sampling to represent future uncertainty. However, this paradigm suffers from inherent limitations, such as lacking explicit probabilities, inadequate coverage, and high computational costs. In this work, we introduce \textbf{Probabilistic Scenarios}, an alternative paradigm designed to address the limitations of sampling. It operates by directly producing a finite set of \{Scenario, Probability\} pairs, thus avoiding Monte Carlo-like approximation. To validate this paradigm, we propose \textbf{TimePrism}, a simple model composed of only three parallel linear layers. Surprisingly, TimePrism achieves 9 out of 10 state-of-the-art results across five benchmark datasets on two metrics. The effectiveness of our paradigm comes from a fundamental reframing of the learning objective. Instead of modeling an entire continuous probability space, the model learns to represent a set of plausible scenarios and corresponding probabilities. Our work demonstrates the potential of the Probabilistic Scenarios paradigm, opening a promising research direction in forecasting beyond sampling.
Oversampling and Downsampling with Core-Boundary Awareness: A Data Quality-Driven Approach
Belhaouari, Samir Brahim, Kahalan, Yunis Carreon, Shaffique, Humaira, Belhaouari, Ismael, Islam, Ashhadul
The effectiveness of machine learning models, particularly in unbalanced classification tasks, is often hindered by the failure to differentiate between critical instances near the decision boundary and redundant samples concentrated in the core of the data distribution. In this paper, we propose a method to systematically identify and differentiate between these two types of data. Through extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, we show that the boundary data oversampling method improves the F1 score by up to 10\% on 96\% of the datasets, whereas our core-aware reduction method compresses datasets up to 90\% while preserving their accuracy, making it 10 times more powerful than the original dataset. Beyond imbalanced classification, our method has broader implications for efficient model training, particularly in computationally expensive domains such as Large Language Model (LLM) training. By prioritizing high-quality, decision-relevant data, our approach can be extended to text, multimodal, and self-supervised learning scenarios, offering a pathway to faster convergence, improved generalization, and significant computational savings. This work paves the way for future research in data-efficient learning, where intelligent sampling replaces brute-force expansion, driving the next generation of AI advancements. Our code is available as a Python package at https://pypi.org/project/adaptive-resampling/ .
Dynamicasome: a molecular dynamics-guided and AI-driven pathogenicity prediction catalogue for all genetic mutations
Islam, Naeyma N, Coban, Mathew A, Fuller, Jessica M, Weber, Caleb, Chitale, Rohit, Jussila, Benjamin, Brock, Trisha J., Tao, Cui, Caulfield, Thomas R
Advances in genomic medicine accelerate the identi cation of mutations in disease-associated genes, but the pathogenicity of many mutations remains unknown, hindering their use in diagnostics and clinical decision-making. Predictive AI models are generated to combat this issue, but current tools display low accuracy when tested against functionally validated datasets. We show that integrating detailed conformational data extracted from molecular dynamics simulations (MDS) into advanced AI-based models increases their predictive power. We carry out an exhaustive mutational analysis of the disease gene PMM2 and subject structural models of each variant to MDS. AI models trained on this dataset outperform existing tools when predicting the known pathogenicity of mutations. Our best performing model, a neuronal networks model, also predicts the pathogenicity of several PMM2 mutations currently considered of unknown signi cance. We believe this model helps alleviate the burden of unknown variants in genomic medicine.
Causal Machine Learning for Surgical Interventions
Tamo, J. Ben, Chouhan, Nishant S., Nnamdi, Micky C., Yuan, Yining, Chivilkar, Shreya S., Shi, Wenqi, Hwang, Steven W., Brenn, B. Randall, Wang, May D.
Surgical decision-making is complex and requires understanding causal relationships between patient characteristics, interventions, and outcomes. In high-stakes settings like spinal fusion or scoliosis correction, accurate estimation of individualized treatment effects (ITEs) remains limited due to the reliance on traditional statistical methods that struggle with complex, heterogeneous data. In this study, we develop a multi-task meta-learning framework, X-MultiTask, for ITE estimation that models each surgical decision (e.g., anterior vs. posterior approach, surgery vs. no surgery) as a distinct task while learning shared representations across tasks. To strengthen causal validity, we incorporate the inverse probability weighting (IPW) into the training objective. We evaluate our approach on two datasets: (1) a public spinal fusion dataset (1,017 patients) to assess the effect of anterior vs. posterior approaches on complication severity; and (2) a private AIS dataset (368 patients) to analyze the impact of posterior spinal fusion (PSF) vs. non-surgical management on patient-reported outcomes (PROs). Our model achieves the highest average AUC (0.84) in the anterior group and maintains competitive performance in the posterior group (0.77). It outperforms baselines in treatment effect estimation with the lowest overall $ฮต_{\text{NN-PEHE}}$ (0.2778) and $ฮต_{\text{ATE}}$ (0.0763). Similarly, when predicting PROs in AIS, X-MultiTask consistently shows superior performance across all domains, with $ฮต_{\text{NN-PEHE}}$ = 0.2551 and $ฮต_{\text{ATE}}$ = 0.0902. By providing robust, patient-specific causal estimates, X-MultiTask offers a powerful tool to advance personalized surgical care and improve patient outcomes. The code is available at https://github.com/Wizaaard/X-MultiTask.
Linear Transformers Implicitly Discover Unified Numerical Algorithms
Lutz, Patrick, Gangrade, Aditya, Daneshmand, Hadi, Saligrama, Venkatesh
We train a linear attention transformer on millions of masked-block matrix completion tasks: each prompt is masked low-rank matrix whose missing block may be (i) a scalar prediction target or (ii) an unseen kernel slice of Nystrรถm extrapolation. The model sees only input-output pairs and a mean-squared loss; it is given no normal equations, no handcrafted iterations, and no hint that the tasks are related. Surprisingly, after training, algebraic unrolling reveals the same parameter-free update rule across three distinct computational regimes (full visibility, rank-limited updates, and distributed computation). We prove that this rule achieves second-order convergence on full-batch problems, cuts distributed iteration complexity, and remains accurate with rank-limited attention. Thus, a transformer trained solely to patch missing blocks implicitly discovers a unified, resource-adaptive iterative solver spanning prediction, estimation, and Nystrรถm extrapolation, highlighting a powerful capability of in-context learning.
Efficient Online Large-Margin Classification via Dual Certificates
Ho-Nguyen, Nam, Kฤฑlฤฑnรง-Karzan, Fatma, Nguyen, Ellie, Shen, Lingqing
Online classification is a central problem in optimization, statistical learning and data science. Classical algorithms such as the perceptron offer efficient updates and finite mistake guarantees on linearly separable data, but they do not exploit the underlying geometric structure of the classification problem. We study the offline maximum margin problem through its dual formulation and use the resulting geometric insights to design a principled and efficient algorithm for the online setting. A key feature of our method is its translation invariance, inherited from the offline formulation, which plays a central role in its performance analysis. Our theoretical analysis yields improved mistake and margin bounds that depend only on translation-invariant quantities, offering stronger guarantees than existing algorithms under the same assumptions in favorable settings. In particular, we identify a parameter regime where our algorithm makes at most two mistakes per sequence, whereas the perceptron can be forced to make arbitrarily many mistakes. Our numerical study on real data further demonstrates that our method matches the computational efficiency of existing online algorithms, while significantly outperforming them in accuracy.
Games Are Not Equal: Classifying Cloud Gaming Contexts for Effective User Experience Measurement
Wang, Yifan, Lyu, Minzhao, Sivaraman, Vijay
To tap into the growing market of cloud gaming, whereby game graphics is rendered in the cloud and streamed back to the user as a video feed, network operators are creating monetizable assurance services that dynamically provision network resources. However, without accurately measuring cloud gaming user experience, they cannot assess the effectiveness of their provisioning methods. Basic measures such as bandwidth and frame rate by themselves do not suffice, and can only be interpreted in the context of the game played and the player activity within the game. This paper equips the network operator with a method to obtain a real-time measure of cloud gaming experience by analyzing network traffic, including contextual factors such as the game title and player activity stage. Our method is able to classify the game title within the first five seconds of game launch, and continuously assess the player activity stage as being active, passive, or idle. We deploy it in an ISP hosting NVIDIA cloud gaming servers for the region. We provide insights from hundreds of thousands of cloud game streaming sessions over a three-month period into the dependence of bandwidth consumption and experience level on the gameplay contexts.
Adaptive von Mises-Fisher Likelihood Loss for Supervised Deep Time Series Hashing
Perez, Juan Manuel, Garcia, Kevin, Berry, Brooklyn, Song, Dongjin, Gao, Yifeng
Indexing time series by creating compact binary representations is a fundamental task in time series data mining. Recently, deep learning-based hashing methods have proven effective for indexing time series based on semantic meaning rather than just raw similarity. The purpose of deep hashing is to map samples with the same semantic meaning to identical binary hash codes, enabling more efficient search and retrieval. Unlike other supervised representation learning methods, supervised deep hashing requires a discretization step to convert real-valued representations into binary codes, but this can induce significant information loss. In this paper, we propose a von Mises-Fisher (vMF) hashing loss. The proposed deep hashing model maps data to an M-dimensional hyperspherical space to effectively reduce information loss and models each data class as points following distinct vMF distributions. The designed loss aims to maximize the separation between each modeled vMF distribution to provide a better way to maximize the margin between each semantically different data sample. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing baselines. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/jmpq97/vmf-hashing
Improved Therapeutic Antibody Reformatting through Multimodal Machine Learning
Xin, Jiayi, Raghu, Aniruddh, Bhattacharya, Nick, Carr, Adam, Montgomery, Melanie, Elliott, Hunter
Modern therapeutic antibody design often involves composing multi-part assemblages of individual functional domains, each of which may be derived from a different source or engineered independently. While these complex formats can expand disease applicability and improve safety, they present a significant engineering challenge: the function and stability of individual domains are not guaranteed in the novel format, and the entire molecule may no longer be synthesizable. To address these challenges, we develop a machine learning framework to predict "reformatting success" -- whether converting an antibody from one format to another will succeed or not. Our framework incorporates both antibody sequence and structural context, incorporating an evaluation protocol that reflects realistic deployment scenarios. In experiments on a real-world antibody reformatting dataset, we find the surprising result that large pretrained protein language models (PLMs) fail to outperform simple, domain-tailored, multimodal representations. This is particularly evident in the most difficult evaluation setting, where we test model generalization to a new starting antibody. In this challenging "new antibody, no data" scenario, our best multimodal model achieves high predictive accuracy, enabling prioritization of promising candidates and reducing wasted experimental effort.
Terra: Hierarchical Terrain-Aware 3D Scene Graph for Task-Agnostic Outdoor Mapping
Samuelson, Chad R., Austin, Abigail, Knoop, Seth, Romrell, Blake, Slade, Gabriel R., McLain, Timothy W., Mangelson, Joshua G.
Outdoor intelligent autonomous robotic operation relies on a sufficiently expressive map of the environment. Classical geometric mapping methods retain essential structural environment information, but lack a semantic understanding and organization to allow high-level robotic reasoning. 3D scene graphs (3DSGs) address this limitation by integrating geometric, topological, and semantic relationships into a multi-level graph-based map. Outdoor autonomous operations commonly rely on terrain information either due to task-dependence or the traversability of the robotic platform. We propose a novel approach that combines indoor 3DSG techniques with standard outdoor geometric mapping and terrain-aware reasoning, producing terrain-aware place nodes and hierarchically organized regions for outdoor environments. Our method generates a task-agnostic metric-semantic sparse map and constructs a 3DSG from this map for downstream planning tasks, all while remaining lightweight for autonomous robotic operation. Our thorough evaluation demonstrates our 3DSG method performs on par with state-of-the-art camera-based 3DSG methods in object retrieval and surpasses them in region classification while remaining memory efficient. We demonstrate its effectiveness in diverse robotic tasks of object retrieval and region monitoring in both simulation and real-world environments.