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 Statistical Learning


Wasserstein distance based semi-supervised manifold learning and application to GNSS multi-path detection

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The main objective of this study is to propose an optimal transport based semi-supervised approach to learn from scarce labelled image data using deep convolutional networks. The principle lies in implicit graph-based transductive semi-supervised learning where the similarity metric between image samples is the Wasserstein distance. This metric is used in the label propagation mechanism during learning. We apply and demonstrate the effectiveness of the method on a GNSS real life application. More specifically, we address the problem of multi-path interference detection. Experiments are conducted under various signal conditions. The results show that for specific choices of hyperparameters controlling the amount of semi-supervision and the level of sensitivity to the metric, the classification accuracy can be significantly improved over the fully supervised training method.


Do We Really Even Need Data? A Modern Look at Drawing Inference with Predicted Data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

As artificial intelligence and machine learning tools become more accessible, and scientists face new obstacles to data collection (e.g., rising costs, declining survey response rates), researchers increasingly use predictions from pre-trained algorithms as substitutes for missing or unobserved data. Though appealing for financial and logistical reasons, using standard tools for inference can misrepresent the association between independent variables and the outcome of interest when the true, unobserved outcome is replaced by a predicted value. In this paper, we characterize the statistical challenges inherent to drawing inference with predicted data (IPD) and show that high predictive accuracy does not guarantee valid downstream inference. We show that all such failures reduce to statistical notions of (i) bias, when predictions systematically shift the estimand or distort relationships among variables, and (ii) variance, when uncertainty from the prediction model and the intrinsic variability of the true data are ignored. We then review recent methods for conducting IPD and discuss how this framework is deeply rooted in classical statistical theory. We then comment on some open questions and interesting avenues for future work in this area, and end with some comments on how to use predicted data in scientific studies that is both transparent and statistically principled.


Symmetric Linear Dynamical Systems are Learnable from Few Observations

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We consider the problem of learning the parameters of a $N$-dimensional stochastic linear dynamics under both full and partial observations from a single trajectory of time $T$. We introduce and analyze a new estimator that achieves a small maximum element-wise error on the recovery of symmetric dynamic matrices using only $T=\mathcal{O}(\log N)$ observations, irrespective of whether the matrix is sparse or dense. This estimator is based on the method of moments and does not rely on problem-specific regularization. This is especially important for applications such as structure discovery.


Impugan: Learning Conditional Generative Models for Robust Data Imputation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Incomplete data are common in real-world applications. Sensors fail, records are inconsistent, and datasets collected from different sources often differ in scale, sampling rate, and quality. These differences create missing values that make it difficult to combine data and build reliable models. Standard imputation methods such as regression models, expectation-maximization, and multiple imputation rely on strong assumptions about linearity and independence. These assumptions rarely hold for complex or heterogeneous data, which can lead to biased or over-smoothed estimates. We propose Impugan, a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) for imputing missing values and integrating heterogeneous datasets. The model is trained on complete samples to learn how missing variables depend on observed ones. During inference, the generator reconstructs missing entries from available features, and the discriminator enforces realism by distinguishing true from imputed data. This adversarial process allows Impugan to capture nonlinear and multimodal relationships that conventional methods cannot represent. In experiments on benchmark datasets and a multi-source integration task, Impugan achieves up to 82\% lower Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and 70\% lower mutual-information deviation (MI) compared to leading baselines. These results show that adversarially trained generative models provide a scalable and principled approach for imputing and merging incomplete, heterogeneous data. Our model is available at: github.com/zalishmahmud/impuganBigData2025


World Models That Know When They Don't Know: Controllable Video Generation with Calibrated Uncertainty

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advances in generative video models have led to significant breakthroughs in high-fidelity video synthesis, specifically in controllable video generation where the generated video is conditioned on text and action inputs, e.g., in instruction-guided video editing and world modeling in robotics. Despite these exceptional capabilities, controllable video models often hallucinate - generating future video frames that are misaligned with physical reality - which raises serious concerns in many tasks such as robot policy evaluation and planning. However, state-of-the-art video models lack the ability to assess and express their confidence, impeding hallucination mitigation. To rigorously address this challenge, we propose C3, an uncertainty quantification (UQ) method for training continuous-scale calibrated controllable video models for dense confidence estimation at the subpatch level, precisely localizing the uncertainty in each generated video frame. Our UQ method introduces three core innovations to empower video models to estimate their uncertainty. First, our method develops a novel framework that trains video models for correctness and calibration via strictly proper scoring rules. Second, we estimate the video model's uncertainty in latent space, avoiding training instability and prohibitive training costs associated with pixel-space approaches. Third, we map the dense latent-space uncertainty to interpretable pixel-level uncertainty in the RGB space for intuitive visualization, providing high-resolution uncertainty heatmaps that identify untrustworthy regions. Through extensive experiments on large-scale robot learning datasets (Bridge and DROID) and real-world evaluations, we demonstrate that our method not only provides calibrated uncertainty estimates within the training distribution, but also enables effective out-of-distribution detection.


Machine-learning-enabled interpretation of tribological deformation patterns in large-scale MD data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Conventional Data Processing Workflow Conventional MD analysis, which has been used in previous data evaluation [2, 32, 33] and can serve labeling and validation purposes for ML model construction and preparation, employs a multi-tiered data distillation process to derive robust trends, see Figure 1. In the left column of this figure, we show representative examples of computational tomographs through the 3D MD model, with the atoms colored by (a) grain orientation in electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) standard, (b) lattice type, grain boundaries, and defects, (c) advection (drift) velocity to visualize shearing, and (d) local stresses. As a first step in the data distillation process, these 3D data that are stored for each atom are averaged across the lateral system dimensions, revealing depth-resolved, time-dependent quantities of interest, as visualized in the heat map at the top of the middle column (e). Further elimination of the sample depth and time dimensions leads to time-resolved global quantities (f) and contact pressure dependent trends (g), which can be fitted with characteristic pressures that mark the transition between deformation patterns (h). As an outlook to the utility of such highly distilled data, we propose their incorporation into Ashby-style charts, as schematically shown in Figure 1 (i), which link material properties with tribological properties. This conventional approach 2 accommodates the complexities of polycrystalline materials under tribological loading conditions and is guided by the underlying physics, resulting in this time-consuming procedure. Thus, substituting this approach with a well-trained ML model is highly relevant. The conventional approach can serve as the ground truth for training this ML model or to refine and validate said model based on newly generated MD data.


Label-Efficient Point Cloud Segmentation with Active Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--Semantic segmentation of 3D point cloud data often comes with high annotation costs. Active learning automates the process of selecting which data to annotate, reducing the total amount of annotation needed to achieve satisfactory performance. Recent approaches to active learning for 3D point clouds are often based on sophisticated heuristics for both, splitting point clouds into annotatable regions and selecting the most beneficial for further neural network training. In this work, we propose a novel and easy-to-implement strategy to separate the point cloud into annotatable regions. In our approach, we utilize a 2D grid to subdivide the point cloud into columns. T o identify the next data to be annotated, we employ a network ensemble to estimate the uncertainty in the network output. We evaluate our method on the S3DIS dataset, the T oronto-3D dataset, and a large-scale urban 3D point cloud of the city of Freiburg, which we labeled in parts manually. The extensive evaluation shows that our method yields performance on par with, or even better than, complex state-of-the-art methods on all datasets. Furthermore, we provide results suggesting that in the context of point clouds the annotated area can be a more meaningful measure for active learning algorithms than the number of annotated points. Semantic point cloud segmentation is pivotal for many applications including robotics, urban planning, and environmental monitoring. The semantic segmentation of urban point cloud data is particularly important as a basis for wind, water, and heat simulations [1].


Bounded Graph Clustering with Graph Neural Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In community detection, many methods require the user to specify the number of clusters in advance since an exhaustive search over all possible values is computationally infeasible. While some classical algorithms can infer this number directly from the data, this is typically not the case for graph neural networks (GNNs): even when a desired number of clusters is specified, standard GNN-based methods often fail to return the exact number due to the way they are designed. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing a flexible and principled way to control the number of communities discovered by GNNs. Rather than assuming the true number of clusters is known, we propose a framework that allows the user to specify a plausible range and enforce these bounds during training. However, if the user wants an exact number of clusters, it may also be specified and reliably returned.


Improving Local Fidelity Through Sampling and Modeling Nonlinearity

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the increasing complexity of black-box machine learning models and their adoption in high-stakes areas, it is critical to provide explanations for their predictions. Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanation (LIME) is a widely used technique that explains the prediction of any classifier by learning an interpretable model locally around the predicted instance. However, it assumes that the local decision boundary is linear and fails to capture the non-linear relationships, leading to incorrect explanations. In this paper, we propose a novel method that can generate high-fidelity explanations. Multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) is used to model non-linear local boundaries that effectively captures the underlying behavior of the reference model, thereby enhancing the local fidelity of the explanation. Additionally, we utilize the N-ball sampling technique, which samples directly from the desired distribution instead of reweighting samples as done in LIME, further improving the faithfulness score. We evaluate our method on three UCI datasets across different classifiers and varying kernel widths. Experimental results show that our method yields more faithful explanations compared to baselines, achieving an average reduction of 37% in root mean square error, significantly improving local fidelity.


DashFusion: Dual-stream Alignment with Hierarchical Bottleneck Fusion for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) integrates various modalities, such as text, image, and audio, to provide a more comprehensive understanding of sentiment. However, effective MSA is challenged by alignment and fusion issues. Alignment requires synchronizing both temporal and semantic information across modalities, while fusion involves integrating these aligned features into a unified representation. Existing methods often address alignment or fusion in isolation, leading to limitations in performance and efficiency. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel framework called Dual-stream Alignment with Hierarchical Bottleneck Fusion (DashFusion). Firstly, dual-stream alignment module synchronizes multimodal features through temporal and semantic alignment. Temporal alignment employs cross-modal attention to establish frame-level correspondences among multimodal sequences. Semantic alignment ensures consistency across the feature space through contrastive learning. Secondly, supervised contrastive learning leverages label information to refine the modality features. Finally, hierarchical bottleneck fusion progressively integrates multimodal information through compressed bottleneck tokens, which achieves a balance between performance and computational efficiency. We evaluate DashFusion on three datasets: CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and CH-SIMS. Experimental results demonstrate that DashFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance across various metrics, and ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of our alignment and fusion techniques. The codes for our experiments are available at https://github.com/ultramarineX/DashFusion.