Distinguishing cause and effect from bivariate observational data is a foundational problem in many disciplines, but challenging without additional assumptions. Additive noise models (ANMs) are widely used to enable sample-efficient bivariate causal discovery. However, conventional ANM-based methods fail when unobserved mediators corrupt the causal relationship between variables. This paper makes three key contributions: first, we rigorously characterize why standard ANM approaches break down in the presence of unmeasured mediators. Second, we demonstrate that prior solutions for hidden mediation are brittle in finite sample settings, limiting their practical utility. To address these gaps, we propose Bivariate Denoising Diffusion (BiDD) for causal discovery, a method designed to handle latent noise introduced by unmeasured mediators. Unlike prior methods that infer directionality through mean squared error loss comparisons, our approach introduces a novel independence test statistic: during the noising and denoising processes for each variable, we condition on the other variable as input and evaluate the independence of the predicted noise relative to this input. We prove asymptotic consistency of BiDD under the ANM, and conjecture that it performs well under hidden mediation. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate consistent performance, outperforming existing methods in mediator-corrupted settings while maintaining strong performance in mediator-free settings.

Realistic and interactive traffic simulation is essential for training and evaluating autonomous driving systems. However, most existing data-driven simulation methods rely on static initialization or log-replay data, limiting their ability to model dynamic, long-horizon scenarios with evolving agent populations. We propose InfGen, a scenario generation framework that outputs agent states and trajectories in an autoregressive manner. InfGen represents the entire scene as a sequence of tokens, including traffic light signals, agent states, and motion vectors, and uses a transformer model to simulate traffic over time. This design enables InfGen to continuously insert new agents into traffic, supporting infinite scene generation. Experiments demonstrate that InfGen produces realistic, diverse, and adaptive traffic behaviors. Furthermore, reinforcement learning policies trained in InfGen-generated scenarios achieve superior robustness and generalization, validating its utility as a high-fidelity simulation environment for autonomous driving. More information is available at https://metadriverse.github.io/infgen/.

The paper proposes a statistical learning approach to the problem of estimating missing pixels of images, crucial for image inpainting and super-resolution problems. One of the main novelties of the method is that it also provides uncertainty quantifications together with the estimated values. Our core assumption is that the underlying data-generating function comes from a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). A special emphasis is put on band-limited functions, central to signal processing, which form Paley-Wiener type RKHSs. The proposed method, which we call Simultaneously Guaranteed Kernel Interpolation (SGKI), is an extension and refinement of a recently developed kernel method. An advantage of SGKI is that it not only estimates the missing pixels, but also builds non-asymptotic confidence bands for the unobserved values, which are simultaneously guaranteed for all missing pixels. We also show how to compute these bands efficiently using Schur complements, we discuss a generalization to vector-valued functions, and we present a series of numerical experiments on various datasets containing synthetically generated and benchmark images, as well.

Distributed optimization advances centralized machine learning methods by enabling parallel and decentralized learning processes over a network of computing nodes. This work provides an accelerated consensus-based distributed algorithm for locally non-convex optimization using the gradient-tracking technique. The proposed algorithm (i) improves the convergence rate by adding momentum towards the optimal state using the heavy-ball method, while (ii) addressing general sector-bound nonlinearities over the information-sharing network. The link nonlinearity includes any sign-preserving odd sector-bound mapping, for example, log-scale data quantization or clipping in practical applications. For admissible momentum and gradient-tracking parameters, using perturbation theory and eigen-spectrum analysis, we prove convergence even in the presence of sector-bound nonlinearity and for locally non-convex cost functions. Further, in contrast to most existing weight-stochastic algorithms, we adopt weight-balanced (WB) network design. This WB design and perturbation-based analysis allow to handle dynamic directed network of agents to address possible time-varying setups due to link failures or packet drops.

Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs), a prominent approach in Quantum Machine Learning (QML), are emerging as a powerful alternative to classical machine learning methods. Recent studies have focused on the applicability of QNNs to various tasks, such as time-series forecasting, prediction, and classification, across a wide range of applications, including cybersecurity and medical imaging. With the increased use of smart grids driven by the integration of renewable energy systems, machine learning plays an important role in predicting power demand and detecting system disturbances. This study provides an in-depth investigation of QNNs for predicting the power output of a wind turbine. We assess the predictive performance and simulation time of six QNN configurations that are based on the Z Feature Map for data encoding and varying ansatz structures. Through detailed cross-validation experiments and tests on an unseen hold-out dataset, we experimentally demonstrate that QNNs can achieve predictive performance that is competitive with, and in some cases marginally better than, the benchmarked classical approaches. Our results also reveal the effects of dataset size and circuit complexity on predictive performance and simulation time. We believe our findings will offer valuable insights for researchers in the energy domain who wish to incorporate quantum machine learning into their work.

-- In graph signal processing, learning the weighted connections between nodes from a set of sample signals is a fundamental task when the underlying relationships are not known a priori. This task is typically addressed by finding a graph Laplacian on which the observed signals are smooth. With the extension of graphs to hypergraphs - where edges can connect more than two nodes - graph learning methods have similarly been generalized to hypergraphs. However, the absence of a unified framework for calculating total variation has led to divergent definitions of smoothness and, consequently, differing approaches to hyperedge recovery. We confront this challenge through generalization of several previously proposed hypergraph total variations, subsequently allowing ease of substitution into a vector based optimization. T o this end, we propose a novel hypergraph learning method that recovers a hypergraph topology from time-series signals based on a smoothness prior . Our approach, designated as Hypergraph Structure Learning with Smoothness (HSLS), addresses key limitations in prior works, such as hyperedge selection and convergence issues, by formulating the problem as a convex optimization solved via a forward-backward-forward algorithm, ensuring guaranteed convergence. Additionally, we introduce a process that simultaneously limits the span of the hyperedge search and maintains a valid hyperedge selection set. In doing so, our method becomes scalable in increasingly complex network structures. The experimental results demonstrate improved performance, in terms of accuracy, over other state-of-the-art hypergraph inference methods; furthermore, we empirically show our method to be robust to total variation terms, biased towards global smoothness, and scalable to larger hypergraphs. YPERGRAPHS are considered as generalized graphs that capture higher order relationships [1]. While graphs encode pairwise relationships between nodes through edges, the higher order nature of hypergraphs extends node relations to allow an arbitrary number of nodes to be connected by a hyperedge. Figure 1 contains a sample hypergraph displaying these higher order connections where nodes are considered workers and hyperedges connect workers who are collaborating on a project. B. T. Brown, H. Zhang, and D. L. Lau are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA. G. R. Arce is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA. This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation under grants 1815992 and 1816003 and the AFOSR award FA9550-22-1-0362.

Density-based clustering methods often surpass centroid-based counterparts, when addressing data with noise or arbitrary data distributions common in real-world problems. In this study, we reveal a key property intrinsic to density-based clustering methods regarding the relation between the number of clusters and the neighborhood radius of core points - we empirically show that it is nearly unimodal, and support this claim theoretically in a specific setting. We leverage this property to devise new strategies for finding appropriate values for the radius more efficiently based on the Ternary Search algorithm. This is especially important for large scale data that is high-dimensional, where parameter tuning is computationally intensive. We validate our methodology through extensive applications across a range of high-dimensional, large-scale NLP, Audio, and Computer Vision tasks, demonstrating its practical effectiveness and robustness. This work not only offers a significant advancement in parameter control for density-based clustering but also broadens the understanding regarding the relations between their guiding parameters. Our code is available at https://github.com/oronnir/UnimodalStrategies.

--Unmanned aerial vehicles (UA Vs) are increasingly employed in diverse applications such as land surveying, material transport, and environmental monitoring. Following missions like data collection or inspection, UA Vs must land safely at docking stations for storage or recharging, which is an essential requirement for ensuring operational continuity. However, accurate landing remains challenging due to factors like GPS signal interference. T o address this issue, we propose a deviation warning system for UA V landings, powered by a novel vision-based model called AeroLite-MDNet. This model integrates a multiscale fusion module for robust cross-scale object detection and incorporates a segmentation branch for efficient orientation estimation. We introduce a new evaluation metric, A verage Warning Delay (A WD), to quantify the system's sensitivity to landing deviations. Furthermore, we contribute a new dataset, UA VLand-Data, which captures real-world landing deviation scenarios to support training and evaluation. Experimental results show that our system achieves an A WD of 0.7 seconds with a deviation detection accuracy of 98.6%, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing UA V landing reliability. NMANNED aerial vehicles (UA Vs), also known as drones, have been widely used in fire detection, geological hazard monitoring, and dangerous behavior monitoring [1] for their agility, compactness, and cost-efficiency. To reduce the dependency of UA Vs on human labor and skills, UA V nests are widely used to minimize manual operations, allowing the UA Vs to perform autonomous monitoring. UA V nests also offer functionalities such as safe parking, charging, data transmission, routine maintenance, repairs, and communication relays [2].

Currently, considerable strides have been achieved in Point-of-Interest (POI) embedding methodologies, driven by the emergence of novel POI tasks like recommendation and classification. Despite the success of task-specific, end-to-end models in POI embedding, several challenges remain. These include the need for more effective multi-context sampling strategies, insufficient exploration of multiple POI contexts, limited versatility, and inadequate generalization. To address these issues, we propose the AdaptGOT model, which integrates both the (Adapt)ive representation learning technique and the Geographical-Co-Occurrence-Text (GOT) representation with a particular emphasis on Geographical location, Co-Occurrence and Textual information. The AdaptGOT model comprises three key components: (1) contextual neighborhood generation, which integrates advanced mixed sampling techniques such as KNN, density-based, importance-based, and category-aware strategies to capture complex contextual neighborhoods; (2) an advanced GOT representation enhanced by an attention mechanism, designed to derive high-quality, customized representations and efficiently capture complex interrelations between POIs; and (3) the MoE-based adaptive encoder-decoder architecture, which ensures topological consistency and enriches contextual representation by minimizing Jensen-Shannon divergence across varying contexts. Experiments on two real-world datasets and multiple POI tasks substantiate the superior performance of the proposed AdaptGOT model.

In many industries, predicting metric outcomes of large systems is a fundamental problem, driven largely by traditional tabular regression. However, such methods struggle on complex systems data in the wild such as configuration files or system logs, where feature engineering is often infeasible. We propose text-to-text regression as a general, scalable alternative. For predicting resource efficiency on Borg, Google's massive compute cluster scheduling system, a 60M parameter encoder-decoder, trained from random initialization, achieves up to a near perfect 0.99 (0.9 average) rank correlation across the entire fleet, and 100x lower MSE than tabular approaches. The model also easily adapts to new tasks in only 500 few-shot examples and captures the densities of complex outcome distributions. Ablation studies highlight the importance of using encoders, increasing sequence length, and the model's inherent uncertainty quantification. These findings pave the way for universal simulators of real-world outcomes.