Uncertainty
TabMGP: Martingale Posterior with TabPFN
Ng, Kenyon, Fong, Edwin, Frazier, David T., Knoblauch, Jeremias, Wei, Susan
Bayesian inference provides principled uncertainty quantification but is often limited by challenges of prior elicitation, likelihood misspecification, and computational burden. The martingale posterior (MGP, Fong et al., 2023) offers an alternative, replacing prior-likelihood elicitation with a predictive rule -- namely, a sequence of one-step-ahead predictive distributions -- for forward data generation. The utility of MGPs depends on the choice of predictive rule, yet the literature has offered few compelling examples. Foundation transformers are well-suited here, as their autoregressive generation mirrors this forward simulation and their general-purpose design enables rich predictive modeling. We introduce TabMGP, an MGP built on TabPFN, a transformer foundation model that is currently state-of-the-art for tabular data. TabMGP produces credible sets with near-nominal coverage and often outperforms both existing MGP constructions and standard Bayes.
Bayesian neural networks with interpretable priors from Mercer kernels
Alberts, Alex, Bilionis, Ilias
Quantifying the uncertainty in the output of a neural network is essential for deployment in scientific or engineering applications where decisions must be made under limited or noisy data. Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) provide a framework for this purpose by constructing a Bayesian posterior distribution over the network parameters. However, the prior, which is of key importance in any Bayesian setting, is rarely meaningful for BNNs. This is because the complexity of the input-to-output map of a BNN makes it difficult to understand how certain distributions enforce any interpretable constraint on the output space. Gaussian processes (GPs), on the other hand, are often preferred in uncertainty quantification tasks due to their interpretability. The drawback is that GPs are limited to small datasets without advanced techniques, which often rely on the covariance kernel having a specific structure. To address these challenges, we introduce a new class of priors for BNNs, called Mercer priors, such that the resulting BNN has samples which approximate that of a specified GP. The method works by defining a prior directly over the network parameters from the Mercer representation of the covariance kernel, and does not rely on the network having a specific structure. In doing so, we can exploit the scalability of BNNs in a meaningful Bayesian way.
VIKING: Deep variational inference with stochastic projections
Fadel, Samuel G., Roy, Hrittik, Krรคmer, Nicholas, Zainchkovskyy, Yevgen, Syrota, Stas, Mahou, Alejandro Valverde, Ek, Carl Henrik, Hauberg, Sรธren
Variational mean field approximations tend to struggle with contemporary overparametrized deep neural networks. Where a Bayesian treatment is usually associated with high-quality predictions and uncertainties, the practical reality has been the opposite, with unstable training, poor predictive power, and subpar calibration. Building upon recent work on reparametrizations of neural networks, we propose a simple variational family that considers two independent linear subspaces of the parameter space. These represent functional changes inside and outside the support of training data. This allows us to build a fully-correlated approximate posterior reflecting the overparametrization that tunes easy-to-interpret hyperparameters. We develop scalable numerical routines that maximize the associated evidence lower bound (ELBO) and sample from the approximate posterior. Empirically, we observe state-of-the-art performance across tasks, models, and datasets compared to a wide array of baseline methods. Our results show that approximate Bayesian inference applied to deep neural networks is far from a lost cause when constructing inference mechanisms that reflect the geometry of reparametrizations.
Sample-efficient and Scalable Exploration in Continuous-Time RL
Iten, Klemens, Treven, Lenart, Sukhija, Bhavya, Dรถrfler, Florian, Krause, Andreas
Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically designed for discrete-time dynamics, even though the underlying real-world control systems are often continuous in time. In this paper, we study the problem of continuous-time reinforcement learning, where the unknown system dynamics are represented using nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs). We leverage probabilistic models, such as Gaussian processes and Bayesian neural networks, to learn an uncertainty-aware model of the underlying ODE. Our algorithm, COMBRL, greedily maximizes a weighted sum of the extrinsic reward and model epistemic uncertainty. This yields a scalable and sample-efficient approach to continuous-time model-based RL. We show that COMBRL achieves sublinear regret in the reward-driven setting, and in the unsupervised RL setting (i.e., without extrinsic rewards), we provide a sample complexity bound. In our experiments, we evaluate COMBRL in both standard and unsupervised RL settings and demonstrate that it scales better, is more sample-efficient than prior methods, and outperforms baselines across several deep RL tasks.
A Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for Synthetic Trip Data Generation in Public Transport
Wu, Yuanyuan, Qin, Zhenlin, Ma, Zhenliang
Synthetic data offers a promising solution to the privacy and accessibility challenges of using smart card data in public transport research. Despite rapid progress in generative modeling, there is limited attention to comprehensive evaluation, leaving unclear how reliable, safe, and useful synthetic data truly are. Existing evaluations remain fragmented, typically limited to population-level representativeness or record-level privacy, without considering group-level variations or task-specific utility. To address this gap, we propose a Representativeness-Privacy-Utility (RPU) framework that systematically evaluates synthetic trip data across three complementary dimensions and three hierarchical levels (record, group, population). The framework integrates a consistent set of metrics to quantify similarity, disclosure risk, and practical usefulness, enabling transparent and balanced assessment of synthetic data quality. We apply the framework to benchmark twelve representative generation methods, spanning conventional statistical models, deep generative networks, and privacy-enhanced variants. Results show that synthetic data do not inherently guarantee privacy and there is no "one-size-fits-all" model, the trade-off between privacy and representativeness/utility is obvious. Conditional Tabular generative adversarial network (CTGAN) provide the most balanced trade-off and is suggested for practical applications. The RPU framework provides a systematic and reproducible basis for researchers and practitioners to compare synthetic data generation techniques and select appropriate methods in public transport applications.
Transformers can do Bayesian Clustering
Bhaskaran, Prajit, Viering, Tom
Bayesian clustering accounts for uncertainty but is computationally demanding at scale. Furthermore, real-world datasets often contain missing values, and simple imputation ignores the associated uncertainty, resulting in suboptimal results. We present Cluster-PFN, a Transformer-based model that extends Prior-Data Fitted Networks (PFNs) to unsupervised Bayesian clustering. Trained entirely on synthetic datasets generated from a finite Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) prior, Cluster-PFN learns to estimate the posterior distribution over both the number of clusters and the cluster assignments. Our method estimates the number of clusters more accurately than handcrafted model selection procedures such as AIC, BIC and Variational Inference (VI), and achieves clustering quality competitive with VI while being orders of magnitude faster. Cluster-PFN can be trained on complex priors that include missing data, outperforming imputation-based baselines on real-world genomic datasets, at high missingness. These results show that the Cluster-PFN can provide scalable and flexible Bayesian clustering.
Noise is All You Need: Solving Linear Inverse Problems by Noise Combination Sampling with Diffusion Models
Pretrained diffusion models have demonstrated strong capabilities in zero-shot inverse problem solving by incorporating observation information into the generation process of the diffusion models. However, this presents an inherent dilemma: excessive integration can disrupt the generative process, while insufficient integration fails to emphasize the constraints imposed by the inverse problem. To address this, we propose \emph{Noise Combination Sampling}, a novel method that synthesizes an optimal noise vector from a noise subspace to approximate the measurement score, replacing the noise term in the standard Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models process. This enables conditional information to be naturally embedded into the generation process without reliance on step-wise hyperparameter tuning. Our method can be applied to a wide range of inverse problem solvers, including image compression, and, particularly when the number of generation steps $T$ is small, achieves superior performance with negligible computational overhead, significantly improving robustness and stability.
Central Bank Digital Currency, Flight-to-Quality, and Bank-Runs in an Agent-Based Model
Barucci, Emilio, Gurgone, Andrea, Iori, Giulia, Azzone, Michele
We analyse financial stability and welfare impacts associated with the introduction of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in a macroeconomic agent-based model. The model considers firms, banks, and households interacting on labour, goods, credit, and interbank markets. Households move their liquidity from deposits to CBDC based on the perceived riskiness of their banks. We find that the introduction of CBDC exacerbates bank-runs and may lead to financial instability phenomena. The effect can be changed by introducing a limit on CBDC holdings. The adoption of CBDC has little effect on macroeconomic variables but the interest rate on loans to firms goes up and credit goes down in a limited way. CBDC leads to a redistribution of wealth from firms and banks to households with a higher bank default rate. CBDC may have negative welfare effects, but a bound on holding enables a welfare improvement.
Evaluating the Use of Large Language Models as Synthetic Social Agents in Social Science Research
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being increasingly used as synthetic agents in social science, in applications ranging from augmenting survey responses to powering multi-agent simulations. This paper outlines cautions that should be taken when interpreting LLM outputs and proposes a pragmatic reframing for the social sciences in which LLMs are used as high-capacity pattern matchers for quasi-predictive interpolation under explicit scope conditions and not as substitutes for probabilistic inference. Practical guardrails such as independent draws, preregistered human baselines, reliability-aware validation, and subgroup calibration, are introduced so that researchers may engage in useful prototyping and forecasting while avoiding category errors.
Reproducible workflow for online AI in digital health
Ghosh, Susobhan, Gullapalli, Bhanu T., Gao, Daiqi, Gazi, Asim, Trella, Anna, Xu, Ziping, Zhang, Kelly, Murphy, Susan A.
Online artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are an important component of digital health interventions. These online algorithms are designed to continually learn and improve their performance as streaming data is collected on individuals. Deploying online AI presents a key challenge: balancing adaptability of online AI with reproducibility. Online AI in digital interventions is a rapidly evolving area, driven by advances in algorithms, sensors, software, and devices. Digital health intervention development and deployment is a continuous process, where implementation - including the AI decision-making algorithm - is interspersed with cycles of re-development and optimization. Each deployment informs the next, making iterative deployment a defining characteristic of this field. This iterative nature underscores the importance of reproducibility: data collected across deployments must be accurately stored to have scientific utility, algorithm behavior must be auditable, and results must be comparable over time to facilitate scientific discovery and trustworthy refinement. This paper proposes a reproducible scientific workflow for developing, deploying, and analyzing online AI decision-making algorithms in digital health interventions. Grounded in practical experience from multiple real-world deployments, this workflow addresses key challenges to reproducibility across all phases of the online AI algorithm development life-cycle.