Uncertainty
Beyond Unimodal: Generalising Neural Processes for Multimodal Uncertainty Estimation
While extensive research on uncertainty estimation has been conducted with unimodal data, uncertainty estimation for multimodal data remains a challenge. Neural processes (NPs) have been demonstrated to be an effective uncertainty estimation method for unimodal data by providing the reliability of Gaussian processes with efficient and powerful DNNs.
DPMM-CFL: Clustered Federated Learning via Dirichlet Process Mixture Model Nonparametric Clustering
Jaramillo-Civill, Mariona, Wu, Peng, Closas, Pau
Clustered Federated Learning (CFL) improves performance under non-IID client heterogeneity by clustering clients and training one model per cluster, thereby balancing between a global model and fully personalized models. However, most CFL methods require the number of clusters K to be fixed a priori, which is impractical when the latent structure is unknown. We propose DPMM-CFL, a CFL algorithm that places a Dirichlet Process (DP) prior over the distribution of cluster parameters. This enables nonparametric Bayesian inference to jointly infer both the number of clusters and client assignments, while optimizing per-cluster federated objectives. This results in a method where, at each round, federated updates and cluster inferences are coupled, as presented in this paper. The algorithm is validated on benchmark datasets under Dirichlet and class-split non-IID partitions.
Bayesian Nonparametric Dynamical Clustering of Time Series
Pérez-Herrero, Adrián, Félix, Paulo, Presedo, Jesús, Ek, Carl Henrik
Abstract--We present a method that models the evolution of an unbounded number of time series clusters by switching among an unknown number of regimes with linear dynamics. We develop a Bayesian non-parametric approach using a hierarchical Dirichlet process as a prior on the parameters of a Switching Linear Dynamical System and a Gaussian process prior to model the statistical variations in amplitude and temporal alignment within each cluster . By modeling the evolution of time series patterns, the method avoids unnecessary proliferation of clusters in a principled manner . We perform inference by formulating a variational lower bound for off-line and on-line scenarios, enabling efficient learning through optimization. We illustrate the versatility and effectiveness of the approach through several case studies of electrocardiogram analysis using publicly available databases. Index T erms--Time series analysis, Bayesian methods, Gaussian processes, linear dynamical systems, Dirichlet processes, unsupervised learning, electrocardiogram, arrhythmia detection. IME series data analysis has come to pervade all scientific and technological domains, driven by the need to understand change over time. With the growing availability of such data, machine learning has assumed an increasingly central role in a wide variety of tasks which fall under the category of pattern recognition. Particularly, there is growing interest in identifying similar behaviors in time series data as a preliminary step towards generating insights into the dynamics of the underlying processes. Some recent methodologies can be found for characterizing sea wave conditions [1], transcriptome-wide gene expression profiling [2], selecting stocks with different share price performance [3], and discovering human motion primitives [4].
Bayesian Optimization under Uncertainty for Training a Scale Parameter in Stochastic Models
Hyperparameter tuning is a challenging problem especially when the system itself involves uncertainty. Due to noisy function evaluations, optimization under uncertainty can be computationally expensive. In this paper, we present a novel Bayesian optimization framework tailored for hyperparameter tuning under uncertainty, with a focus on optimizing a scale- or precision-type parameter in stochastic models. The proposed method employs a statistical surrogate for the underlying random variable, enabling analytical evaluation of the expectation operator. Moreover, we derive a closed-form expression for the optimizer of the random acquisition function, which significantly reduces computational cost per iteration. Compared with a conventional one-dimensional Monte Carlo-based optimization scheme, the proposed approach requires 40 times fewer data points, resulting in up to a 40-fold reduction in computational cost. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through two numerical examples in computational engineering.
Nearly Instance-Optimal Parameter Recovery from Many Trajectories via Hellinger Localization
Shekhtman, Eliot, Zhou, Yichen, Ziemann, Ingvar, Matni, Nikolai, Tu, Stephen
Learning from temporally-correlated data is a core facet of modern machine learning. Yet our understanding of sequential learning remains incomplete, particularly in the multi-trajectory setting where data consists of many independent realizations of a time-indexed stochastic process. This important regime both reflects modern training pipelines such as for large foundation models, and offers the potential for learning without the typical mixing assumptions made in the single-trajectory case. However, instance-optimal bounds are known only for least-squares regression with dependent covariates; for more general models or loss functions, the only broadly applicable guarantees result from a reduction to either i.i.d. learning, with effective sample size scaling only in the number of trajectories, or an existing single-trajectory result when each individual trajectory mixes, with effective sample size scaling as the full data budget deflated by the mixing-time. In this work, we significantly broaden the scope of instance-optimal rates in multi-trajectory settings via the Hellinger localization framework, a general approach for maximum likelihood estimation. Our method proceeds by first controlling the squared Hellinger distance at the path-measure level via a reduction to i.i.d. learning, followed by localization as a quadratic form in parameter space weighted by the trajectory Fisher information. This yields instance-optimal bounds that scale with the full data budget under a broad set of conditions. We instantiate our framework across four diverse case studies: a simple mixture of Markov chains, dependent linear regression under non-Gaussian noise, generalized linear models with non-monotonic activations, and linear-attention sequence models. In all cases, our bounds nearly match the instance-optimal rates from asymptotic normality, substantially improving over standard reductions.
Inference-Time Scaling of Discrete Diffusion Models via Importance Weighting and Optimal Proposal Design
Ou, Zijing, Pani, Chinmay, Li, Yingzhen
Discrete diffusion models have become highly effective across various domains. However, real-world applications often require the generative process to adhere to certain constraints. To this end, we propose a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) framework that enables scalable inference-time control of discrete diffusion models through principled importance weighting and optimal proposal construction. Specifically, our approach derives tractable importance weights for a range of intermediate targets and characterises the optimal proposal, for which we develop two practical approximations: a first-order gradient-based approximation and an amortised proposal trained to minimise the log-variance of the importance weights. Empirical results across synthetic tasks, language modelling, biology design, and text-to-image generation demonstrate that our framework enhances controllability and sample quality, highlighting the effectiveness of SMC as a versatile recipe for scaling discrete diffusion models at inference time.