Statistical Learning
Lightweight Dataset Pruning without Full Training via Example Difficulty and Prediction Uncertainty
Cho, Yeseul, Shin, Baekrok, Kang, Changmin, Yun, Chulhee
Advancements in deep learning have been significantly driven by large-scale datasets. However, recent studies have revealed a power-law relationship between the generalization capacity of deep neural networks and the size of their training data (Gordon et al., 2021; Hestness et al., 2017; Rosenfeld et al., 2019), meaning that the improvement of model performance becomes increasingly cost-inefficient as we scale up the dataset size. Fortunately, Sorscher et al. (2022) demonstrate that the power-law scaling of error can be reduced to exponential scaling with Pareto optimal data pruning. The main goal of dataset pruning is to identify and retain the most informative samples while discarding redundant data points for training neural networks. This approach can alleviate storage and computational costs as well as training efficiency. However, many existing pruning methods require training a model with a full dataset over a number of epochs to measure the importance of each sample, which ironically makes the pruning process more expensive than just training the model once on the original large dataset. For instance, several score-based methods (Gordon et al., 2021; He et al., 2024; Pleiss et al., 2020; Toneva et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2024) require training as they utilize the dynamics from the whole training process. Some geometry-based methods, (Xia et al., 2022; Yang et al., 2024) leverage features from the penultimate layer of the trained model, therefore training a model is Authors contributed equally to this paper.
TimeKAN: KAN-based Frequency Decomposition Learning Architecture for Long-term Time Series Forecasting
Huang, Songtao, Zhao, Zhen, Li, Can, Bai, Lei
Real-world time series often have multiple frequency components that are intertwined with each other, making accurate time series forecasting challenging. Decomposing the mixed frequency components into multiple single frequency components is a natural choice. However, the information density of patterns varies across different frequencies, and employing a uniform modeling approach for different frequency components can lead to inaccurate characterization. To address this challenges, inspired by the flexibility of the recent Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN), we propose a KAN-based Frequency Decomposition Learning architecture (TimeKAN) to address the complex forecasting challenges caused by multiple frequency mixtures. Specifically, TimeKAN mainly consists of three components: Cascaded Frequency Decomposition (CFD) blocks, Multi-order KAN Representation Learning (M-KAN) blocks and Frequency Mixing blocks. CFD blocks adopt a bottom-up cascading approach to obtain series representations for each frequency band. Benefiting from the high flexibility of KAN, we design a novel M-KAN block to learn and represent specific temporal patterns within each frequency band. Finally, Frequency Mixing blocks is used to recombine the frequency bands into the original format. Extensive experimental results across multiple real-world time series datasets demonstrate that TimeKAN achieves state-ofthe-art performance as an extremely lightweight architecture. Time series forecasting (TSF) has garnered significant interest due to its wide range of applications, including finance (Huang et al., 2024), energy management (Yin et al., 2023), traffic flow planning (Jiang & Luo, 2022), and weather forecasting (Lam et al., 2023).
Gradient Based Method for the Fusion of Lattice Quantizers
Zhang, Liyuan, Cao, Hanzhong, Li, Jiaheng, Yu, Minyang
In practical applications, lattice quantizers leverage discrete lattice points to approximate arbitrary points in the lattice. An effective lattice quantizer significantly enhances both the accuracy and efficiency of these approximations. In the context of high-dimensional lattice quantization, previous work proposed utilizing low-dimensional optimal lattice quantizers and addressed the challenge of determining the optimal length ratio in orthogonal splicing. Notably, it was demonstrated that fixed length ratios and orthogonality yield suboptimal results when combining low-dimensional lattices. Building on this foundation, another approach employed gradient descent to identify optimal lattices, which inspired us to explore the use of neural networks to discover matrices that outperform those obtained from orthogonal splicing methods. We propose two novel approaches to tackle this problem: the Household Algorithm and the Matrix Exp Algorithm. Our results indicate that both the Household Algorithm and the Matrix Exp Algorithm achieve improvements in lattice quantizers across dimensions 13, 15, 17 to 19, 21, and 22. Moreover, the Matrix Exp Algorithm demonstrates superior efficacy in high-dimensional settings.
Lipschitz-Driven Inference: Bias-corrected Confidence Intervals for Spatial Linear Models
Burt, David R., Berlinghieri, Renato, Bates, Stephen, Broderick, Tamara
Linear models remain ubiquitous in modern spatial applications - including climate science, public health, and economics - due to their interpretability, speed, and reproducibility. While practitioners generally report a form of uncertainty, popular spatial uncertainty quantification methods do not jointly handle model misspecification and distribution shift - despite both being essentially always present in spatial problems. In the present paper, we show that existing methods for constructing confidence (or credible) intervals in spatial linear models fail to provide correct coverage due to unaccounted-for bias. In contrast to classical methods that rely on an i.i.d. assumption that is inappropriate in spatial problems, in the present work we instead make a spatial smoothness (Lipschitz) assumption. We are then able to propose a new confidence-interval construction that accounts for bias in the estimation procedure. We demonstrate that our new method achieves nominal coverage via both theory and experiments. Code to reproduce experiments is available at https://github.com/DavidRBurt/Lipschitz-Driven-Inference.
Survival Concept-Based Learning Models
Kirpichenko, Stanislav R., Utkin, Lev V., Konstantinov, Andrei V., Verbova, Natalya M.
Concept-based learning enhances prediction accuracy and interpretability by leveraging high-level, human-understandable concepts. However, existing CBL frameworks do not address survival analysis tasks, which involve predicting event times in the presence of censored data -- a common scenario in fields like medicine and reliability analysis. To bridge this gap, we propose two novel models: SurvCBM (Survival Concept-based Bottleneck Model) and SurvRCM (Survival Regularized Concept-based Model), which integrate concept-based learning with survival analysis to handle censored event time data. The models employ the Cox proportional hazards model and the Beran estimator. SurvCBM is based on the architecture of the well-known concept bottleneck model, offering interpretable predictions through concept-based explanations. SurvRCM uses concepts as regularization to enhance accuracy. Both models are trained end-to-end and provide interpretable predictions in terms of concepts. Two interpretability approaches are proposed: one leveraging the linear relationship in the Cox model and another using an instance-based explanation framework with the Beran estimator. Numerical experiments demonstrate that SurvCBM outperforms SurvRCM and traditional survival models, underscoring the importance and advantages of incorporating concept information. The code for the proposed algorithms is publicly available.
Foundation Model of Electronic Medical Records for Adaptive Risk Estimation
Renc, Pawel, Grzeszczyk, Michal K., Oufattole, Nassim, Goode, Deirdre, Jia, Yugang, Bieganski, Szymon, McDermott, Matthew B. A., Was, Jaroslaw, Samir, Anthony E., Cunningham, Jonathan W., Bates, David W., Sitek, Arkadiusz
We developed the Enhanced Transformer for Health Outcome Simulation (ETHOS), an AI model that tokenizes patient health timelines (PHTs) from EHRs. ETHOS predicts future PHTs using transformer-based architectures. The Adaptive Risk Estimation System (ARES) employs ETHOS to compute dynamic and personalized risk probabilities for clinician-defined critical events. ARES incorporates a personalized explainability module that identifies key clinical factors influencing risk estimates for individual patients. ARES was evaluated on the MIMIC-IV v2.2 dataset in emergency department (ED) settings, benchmarking its performance against traditional early warning systems and machine learning models. We processed 299,721 unique patients from MIMIC-IV into 285,622 PHTs, with 60% including hospital admissions. The dataset contained over 357 million tokens. ETHOS outperformed benchmark models in predicting hospital admissions, ICU admissions, and prolonged hospital stays, achieving superior AUC scores. ETHOS-based risk estimates demonstrated robustness across demographic subgroups with strong model reliability, confirmed via calibration curves. The personalized explainability module provides insights into patient-specific factors contributing to risk. ARES, powered by ETHOS, advances predictive healthcare AI by providing dynamic, real-time, and personalized risk estimation with patient-specific explainability to enhance clinician trust. Its adaptability and superior accuracy position it as a transformative tool for clinical decision-making, potentially improving patient outcomes and resource allocation in emergency and inpatient settings. We release the full code at github.com/ipolharvard/ethos-ares to facilitate future research.
Diffusion Models for Inverse Problems in the Exponential Family
Micheli, Alessandro, Monod, Mélodie, Bhatt, Samir
Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for solving inverse problems, yet prior work has primarily focused on observations with Gaussian measurement noise, restricting their use in real-world scenarios. This limitation persists due to the intractability of the likelihood score, which until now has only been approximated in the simpler case of Gaussian likelihoods. In this work, we extend diffusion models to handle inverse problems where the observations follow a distribution from the exponential family, such as a Poisson or a Binomial distribution. By leveraging the conjugacy properties of exponential family distributions, we introduce the evidence trick, a method that provides a tractable approximation to the likelihood score. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our methodology effectively performs Bayesian inference on spatially inhomogeneous Poisson processes with intensities as intricate as ImageNet images. Furthermore, we demonstrate the real-world impact of our methodology by showing that it performs competitively with the current state-of-the-art in predicting malaria prevalence estimates in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Kolmogorov-Arnold Fourier Networks
Zhang, Jusheng, Fan, Yijia, Cai, Kaitong, Wang, Keze
Although Kolmogorov-Arnold based interpretable networks (KAN) have strong theoretical expressiveness, they face significant parameter explosion and high-frequency feature capture challenges in high-dimensional tasks. To address this issue, we propose the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Fourier Network (KAF), which effectively integrates trainable Random Fourier Features (RFF) and a novel hybrid GELU-Fourier activation mechanism to balance parameter efficiency and spectral representation capabilities. Our key technical contributions include: (1) merging KAN's dual-matrix structure through matrix association properties to substantially reduce parameters; (2) introducing learnable RFF initialization strategies to eliminate spectral distortion in high-dimensional approximation tasks; (3) implementing an adaptive hybrid activation function that progressively enhances frequency representation during the training process. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our KAF across various domains including vision, NLP, audio processing, and differential equation-solving tasks, effectively combining theoretical interpretability with practical utility and computational efficiency.
A Planning Framework for Adaptive Labeling
Mittal, Daksh, Ma, Yuanzhe, Joshi, Shalmali, Namkoong, Hongseok
Ground truth labels/outcomes are critical for advancing scientific and engineering applications, e.g., evaluating the treatment effect of an intervention or performance of a predictive model. Since randomly sampling inputs for labeling can be prohibitively expensive, we introduce an adaptive labeling framework where measurement effort can be reallocated in batches. We formulate this problem as a Markov decision process where posterior beliefs evolve over time as batches of labels are collected (state transition), and batches (actions) are chosen to minimize uncertainty at the end of data collection. We design a computational framework that is agnostic to different uncertainty quantification approaches including those based on deep learning, and allows a diverse array of policy gradient approaches by relying on continuous policy parameterizations. On real and synthetic datasets, we demonstrate even a one-step lookahead policy can substantially outperform common adaptive labeling heuristics, highlighting the virtue of planning. On the methodological side, we note that standard REINFORCE-style policy gradient estimators can suffer high variance since they rely only on zeroth order information. We propose a direct backpropagation-based approach, Smoothed-Autodiff, based on a carefully smoothed version of the original non-differentiable MDP. Our method enjoys low variance at the price of introducing bias, and we theoretically and empirically show that this trade-off can be favorable.
Uncertainty Quantification and Causal Considerations for Off-Policy Decision Making
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a critical challenge in robust decision-making that seeks to assess the performance of a new policy using data collected under a different policy. However, the existing OPE methodologies suffer from several limitations arising from statistical uncertainty as well as causal considerations. In this thesis, we address these limitations by presenting three different works. Firstly, we consider the problem of high variance in the importance-sampling-based OPE estimators. We introduce the Marginal Ratio (MR) estimator, a novel OPE method that reduces variance by focusing on the marginal distribution of outcomes rather than direct policy shifts, improving robustness in contextual bandits. Next, we propose Conformal Off-Policy Prediction (COPP), a principled approach for uncertainty quantification in OPE that provides finite-sample predictive intervals, ensuring robust decision-making in risk-sensitive applications. Finally, we address causal unidentifiability in off-policy decision-making by developing novel bounds for sequential decision settings, which remain valid under arbitrary unmeasured confounding. We apply these bounds to assess the reliability of digital twin models, introducing a falsification framework to identify scenarios where model predictions diverge from real-world behaviour. Our contributions provide new insights into robust decision-making under uncertainty and establish principled methods for evaluating policies in both static and dynamic settings.