Statistical Learning
SchemaCoder: Automatic Log Schema Extraction Coder with Residual Q-Tree Boosting
Wan, Lily Jiaxin, Ho, Chia-Tung, Liang, Rongjian, Yu, Cunxi, Chen, Deming, Ren, Haoxing
Log schema extraction is the process of deriving human-readable templates from massive volumes of log data, which is essential yet notoriously labor-intensive. Recent studies have attempted to streamline this task by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated schema extraction. However, existing methods invariably rely on predefined regular expressions, necessitating human domain expertise and severely limiting productivity gains. To fundamentally address this limitation, we introduce SchemaCoder, the first fully automated schema extraction framework applicable to a wide range of log file formats without requiring human customization within the flow. At its core, SchemaCoder features a novel Residual Question-Tree (Q-Tree) Boosting mechanism that iteratively refines schema extraction through targeted, adaptive queries driven by LLMs. Particularly, our method partitions logs into semantic chunks via context-bounded segmentation, selects representative patterns using embedding-based sampling, and generates schema code through hierarchical Q-Tree-driven LLM queries, iteratively refined by our textual-residual evolutionary optimizer and residual boosting. Experimental validation demonstrates SchemaCoder's superiority on the widely-used LogHub-2.0 benchmark, achieving an average improvement of 21.3% over state-of-the-arts.
BTW: A Non-Parametric Variance Stabilization Framework for Multimodal Model Integration
Hou, Jun, Wang, Le, Wang, Xuan
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become increasingly powerful in multimodal learning by enabling modular specialization across modalities. However, their effectiveness remains unclear when additional modalities introduce more noise than complementary information. Existing approaches, such as the Partial Information Decomposition, struggle to scale beyond two modalities and lack the resolution needed for instance-level control. We propose Beyond Two-modality Weighting (BTW), a bi-level, non-parametric weighting framework that combines instance-level Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and modality-level mutual information (MI) to dynamically adjust modality importance during training. Our method does not require additional parameters and can be applied to an arbitrary number of modalities. Specifically, BTW computes per-example KL weights by measuring the divergence between each unimodal and the current multimodal prediction, and modality-wide MI weights by estimating global alignment between unimodal and multimodal outputs. Extensive experiments on sentiment regression and clinical classification demonstrate that our method significantly improves regression performance and multiclass classification accuracy.
COMET-poly: Machine Translation Metric Grounded in Other Candidates
Zรผfle, Maike, Zouhar, Vilรฉm, Dinh, Tu Anh, Polo, Felipe Maia, Niehues, Jan, Sachan, Mrinmaya
Automated metrics for machine translation attempt to replicate human judgment. Unlike humans, who often assess a translation in the context of multiple alternatives, these metrics typically consider only the source sentence and a single translation. This discrepancy in the evaluation setup may negatively impact the performance of automated metrics. We propose two automated metrics that incorporate additional information beyond the single translation. COMET-polycand uses alternative translations of the same source sentence to compare and contrast with the translation at hand, thereby providing a more informed assessment of its quality. COMET-polyic, inspired by retrieval-based in-context learning, takes in translations of similar source texts along with their human-labeled quality scores to guide the evaluation. We find that including a single additional translation in COMET-polycand improves the segment-level metric performance (0.079 to 0.118 Kendall's tau-b correlation), with further gains when more translations are added. Incorporating retrieved examples in COMET-polyic yields similar improvements (0.079 to 0.116 Kendall's tau-b correlation). We release our models publicly.
Weisfeiler-Leman Features for Planning: A 1,000,000 Sample Size Hyperparameter Study
Weisfeiler-Leman Features (WLFs) are a recently introduced classical machine learning tool for learning to plan and search. They have been shown to be both theoretically and empirically superior to existing deep learning approaches for learning value functions for search in symbolic planning. In this paper, we introduce new WLF hyperparameters and study their various tradeoffs and effects. We utilise the efficiency of WLFs and run planning experiments on single core CPUs with a sample size of 1,000,000 to understand the effect of hyperparameters on training and planning. Our experimental analysis show that there is a robust and best set of hyperparameters for WLFs across the tested planning domains. We find that the best WLF hyperparameters for learning heuristic functions minimise execution time rather than maximise model expressivity. We further statistically analyse and observe no significant correlation between training and planning metrics.
Breaking Through Barren Plateaus: Reinforcement Learning Initializations for Deep Variational Quantum Circuits
Peng, Yifeng, Li, Xinyi, Zhang, Zhemin, Chen, Samuel Yen-Chi, Liang, Zhiding, Wang, Ying
Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) have gained prominence as a viable framework for exploiting near-term quantum devices in applications ranging from optimization and chemistry simulation to machine learning. However, the effectiveness of VQAs is often constrained by the so-called barren plateau problem, wherein gradients diminish exponentially as system size or circuit depth increases, thereby hindering training. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based initialization strategy to alleviate the barren plateau issue by reshaping the initial parameter landscape to avoid regions prone to vanishing gradients. In particular, we explore several RL algorithms (Deterministic Policy Gradient, Soft Actor-Critic, and Proximal Policy Optimization, etc.) to generate the circuit parameters (treated as actions) that minimize the VQAs cost function before standard gradient-based optimization. By pre-training with RL in this manner, subsequent optimization using methods such as gradient descent or Adam proceeds from a more favorable initial state. Extensive numerical experiments under various noise conditions and tasks consistently demonstrate that the RL-based initialization method significantly enhances both convergence speed and final solution quality. Moreover, comparisons among different RL algorithms highlight that multiple approaches can achieve comparable performance gains, underscoring the flexibility and robustness of our method. These findings shed light on a promising avenue for integrating machine learning techniques into quantum algorithm design, offering insights into how RL-driven parameter initialization can accelerate the scalability and practical deployment of VQAs. Opening up a promising path for the research community in machine learning for quantum, especially barren plateau problems in VQAs.
An Analytical Approach to Privacy and Performance Trade-Offs in Healthcare Data Sharing
Wei, Yusi, Benson, Hande Y., Capan, Muge
The secondary use of healthcare data is vital for research and clinical innovation, but it raises concerns about patient privacy. This study investigates how to balance privacy preservation and data utility in healthcare data sharing, considering the perspectives of both data providers and data users. Using a dataset of adult patients hospitalized between 2013 and 2015, we predict whether sepsis was present at admission or developed during the hospital stay. We identify sub-populations, such as older adults, frequently hospitalized patients, and racial minorities, that are especially vulnerable to privacy attacks due to their unique combinations of demographic and healthcare utilization attributes. These groups are also critical for machine learning (ML) model performance. We evaluate three anonymization methods-$k$-anonymity, the technique by Zheng et al., and the MO-OBAM model-based on their ability to reduce re-identification risk while maintaining ML utility. Results show that $k$-anonymity offers limited protection. The methods of Zheng et al. and MO-OBAM provide stronger privacy safeguards, with MO-OBAM yielding the best utility outcomes: only a 2% change in precision and recall compared to the original dataset. This work provides actionable insights for healthcare organizations on how to share data responsibly. It highlights the need for anonymization methods that protect vulnerable populations without sacrificing the performance of data-driven models.
Backprompting: Leveraging Synthetic Production Data for Health Advice Guardrails
Cheng, Kellen Tan, Gentile, Anna Lisa, DeLuca, Chad, Ren, Guang-Jie
The pervasiveness of large language models (LLMs) in enterprise settings has also brought forth a significant amount of risks associated with their usage. Guardrails technologies aim to mitigate this risk by filtering LLMs' input/output text through various detectors. However, developing and maintaining robust detectors faces many challenges, one of which is the difficulty in acquiring production-quality labeled data on real LLM outputs prior to deployment. In this work, we propose backprompting, a simple yet intuitive solution to generate production-like labeled data for health advice guardrails development. Furthermore, we pair our backprompting method with a sparse human-in-the-loop clustering technique to label the generated data. Our aim is to construct a parallel corpus roughly representative of the original dataset yet resembling real LLM output. We then infuse existing datasets with our synthetic examples to produce robust training data for our detector. We test our technique in one of the most difficult and nuanced guardrails: the identification of health advice in LLM output, and demonstrate improvement versus other solutions. Our detector is able to outperform GPT-4o by up to 3.73%, despite having 400x less parameters.
Does Calibration Affect Human Actions?
Nizri, Meir, Azaria, Amos, Gupta, Chirag, Hazon, Noam
Calibration has been proposed as a way to enhance the reliability and adoption of machine learning classifiers. We study a particular aspect of this proposal: how does calibrating a classification model affect the decisions made by non-expert humans consuming the model's predictions? We perform a Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) experiment to ascertain the effect of calibration on (i) trust in the model, and (ii) the correlation between decisions and predictions. We also propose further corrections to the reported calibrated scores based on Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory from behavioral economics, and study the effect of these corrections on trust and decision-making. We find that calibration is not sufficient on its own; the prospect theory correction is crucial for increasing the correlation between human decisions and the model's predictions. While this increased correlation suggests higher trust in the model, responses to ``Do you trust the model more?" are unaffected by the method used.
ProtoEHR: Hierarchical Prototype Learning for EHR-based Healthcare Predictions
Cai, Zi, Liu, Yu, Luo, Zhiyao, Zhu, Tingting
Digital healthcare systems have enabled the collection of mass healthcare data in electronic healthcare records (EHRs), allowing artificial intelligence solutions for various healthcare prediction tasks. However, existing studies often focus on isolated components of EHR data, limiting their predictive performance and interpretability. To address this gap, we propose ProtoEHR, an interpretable hierarchical prototype learning framework that fully exploits the rich, multi-level structure of EHR data to enhance healthcare predictions. More specifically, ProtoEHR models relationships within and across three hierarchical levels of EHRs: medical codes, hospital visits, and patients. We first leverage large language models to extract semantic relationships among medical codes and construct a medical knowledge graph as the knowledge source. Building on this, we design a hierarchical representation learning framework that captures contextualized representations across three levels, while incorporating prototype information within each level to capture intrinsic similarities and improve generalization. To perform a comprehensive assessment, we evaluate ProtoEHR in two public datasets on five clinically significant tasks, including prediction of mortality, prediction of readmission, prediction of length of stay, drug recommendation, and prediction of phenotype. The results demonstrate the ability of ProtoEHR to make accurate, robust, and interpretable predictions compared to baselines in the literature. Furthermore, ProtoEHR offers interpretable insights on code, visit, and patient levels to aid in healthcare prediction.
Learning Spatio-Temporal Dynamics via Operator-Valued RKHS and Kernel Koopman Methods
We introduce a unified framework for learning the spatio-temporal dynamics of vector valued functions by combining operator valued reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (OV-RKHS) with kernel based Koopman operator methods. The approach enables nonparametric and data driven estimation of complex time evolving vector fields while preserving both spatial and temporal structure. We establish representer theorems for time dependent OV-RKHS interpolation, derive Sobolev type approximation bounds for smooth vector fields, and provide spectral convergence guarantees for kernel Koopman operator approximations. This framework supports efficient reduced order modeling and long term prediction of high dimensional nonlinear systems, offering theoretically grounded tools for forecasting, control, and uncertainty quantification in spatio-temporal machine learning.