Uncertainty
Partially Observable Reference Policy Programming: Solving POMDPs Sans Numerical Optimisation
Kim, Edward, Kurniawati, Hanna
This paper proposes Partially Observable Reference Policy Programming, a novel anytime online approximate POMDP solver which samples meaningful future histories very deeply while simultaneously forcing a gradual policy update. We provide theoretical guarantees for the algorithm's underlying scheme which say that the performance loss is bounded by the average of the sampling approximation errors rather than the usual maximum, a crucial requirement given the sampling sparsity of online planning. Empirical evaluations on two large-scale problems with dynamically evolving environments -- including a helicopter emergency scenario in the Corsica region requiring approximately 150 planning steps -- corroborate the theoretical results and indicate that our solver considerably outperforms current online benchmarks.
Fast and Scalable Game-Theoretic Trajectory Planning with Intentional Uncertainties
Huang, Zhenmin, Xie, Yusen, Ma, Benshan, Shen, Shaojie, Ma, Jun
Trajectory planning involving multi-agent interactions has been a long-standing challenge in the field of robotics, primarily burdened by the inherent yet intricate interactions among agents. While game-theoretic methods are widely acknowledged for their effectiveness in managing multi-agent interactions, significant impediments persist when it comes to accommodating the intentional uncertainties of agents. In the context of intentional uncertainties, the heavy computational burdens associated with existing game-theoretic methods are induced, leading to inefficiencies and poor scalability. In this paper, we propose a novel game-theoretic interactive trajectory planning method to effectively address the intentional uncertainties of agents, and it demonstrates both high efficiency and enhanced scalability. As the underpinning basis, we model the interactions between agents under intentional uncertainties as a general Bayesian game, and we show that its agent-form equivalence can be represented as a potential game under certain minor assumptions. The existence and attainability of the optimal interactive trajectories are illustrated, as the corresponding Bayesian Nash equilibrium can be attained by optimizing a unified optimization problem. Additionally, we present a distributed algorithm based on the dual consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) tailored to the parallel solving of the problem, thereby significantly improving the scalability. The attendant outcomes from simulations and experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is effective across a range of scenarios characterized by general forms of intentional uncertainties. Its scalability surpasses that of existing centralized and decentralized baselines, allowing for real-time interactive trajectory planning in uncertain game settings.
Probabilistic Safety Verification for an Autonomous Ground Vehicle: A Situation Coverage Grid Approach
Proma, Nawshin Mannan, Vázquez, Gricel, Shahbeigi, Sepeedeh, Badyal, Arjun, Hodge, Victoria
As industrial autonomous ground vehicles are increasingly deployed in safety-critical environments, ensuring their safe operation under diverse conditions is paramount. This paper presents a novel approach for their safety verification based on systematic situation extraction, probabilistic modelling and verification. We build upon the concept of a situation coverage grid, which exhaustively enumerates environmental configurations relevant to the vehicle's operation. This grid is augmented with quantitative probabilistic data collected from situation-based system testing, capturing probabilistic transitions between situations. We then generate a probabilistic model that encodes the dynamics of both normal and unsafe system behaviour. Safety properties extracted from hazard analysis and formalised in temporal logic are verified through probabilistic model checking against this model. The results demonstrate that our approach effectively identifies high-risk situations, provides quantitative safety guarantees, and supports compliance with regulatory standards, thereby contributing to the robust deployment of autonomous systems.
Neural Human Pose Prior
Heker, Michal, Kararlitsky, Sefy, Tolpin, David
We introduce a principled, data-driven approach for modeling a neural prior over human body poses using normalizing flows. Unlike heuristic or low-expressivity alternatives, our method leverages RealNVP to learn a flexible density over poses represented in the 6D rotation format. We address the challenge of modeling distributions on the manifold of valid 6D rotations by inverting the Gram-Schmidt process during training, enabling stable learning while preserving downstream compatibility with rotation-based frameworks. Our architecture and training pipeline are framework-agnostic and easily reproducible. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the learned prior through both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, and we analyze its impact via ablation studies. This work provides a sound probabilistic foundation for integrating pose priors into human motion capture and reconstruction pipelines.
Canonical Bayesian Linear System Identification
Bryutkin, Andrey, Levine, Matthew E., Urteaga, Iñigo, Marzouk, Youssef
Standard Bayesian approaches for linear time-invariant (LTI) system identification are hindered by parameter non-identifiability; the resulting complex, multi-modal posteriors make inference inefficient and impractical. We solve this problem by embedding canonical forms of LTI systems within the Bayesian framework. We rigorously establish that inference in these minimal parameterizations fully captures all invariant system dynamics (e.g., transfer functions, eigenvalues, predictive distributions of system outputs) while resolving identifiability. This approach unlocks the use of meaningful, structure-aware priors (e.g., enforcing stability via eigenvalues) and ensures conditions for a Bernstein--von Mises theorem -- a link between Bayesian and frequentist large-sample asymptotics that is broken in standard forms. Extensive simulations with modern MCMC methods highlight advantages over standard parameterizations: canonical forms achieve higher computational efficiency, generate interpretable and well-behaved posteriors, and provide robust uncertainty estimates, particularly from limited data.
On Equivariant Model Selection through the Lens of Uncertainty
van der Linden, Putri A., Timans, Alexander, Tailor, Dharmesh, Bekkers, Erik J.
Equivariant models leverage prior knowledge on symmetries to improve predictive performance, but misspecified architectural constraints can harm it instead. While work has explored learning or relaxing constraints, selecting among pretrained models with varying symmetry biases remains challenging. We examine this model selection task from an uncertainty-aware perspective, comparing frequentist (via Conformal Prediction), Bayesian (via the marginal likelihood), and calibration-based measures to naive error-based evaluation. We find that uncertainty metrics generally align with predictive performance, but Bayesian model evidence does so inconsistently. We attribute this to a mismatch in Bayesian and geometric notions of model complexity for the employed last-layer Laplace approximation, and discuss possible remedies. Our findings point towards the potential of uncertainty in guiding symmetry-aware model selection.
Neurosymbolic Reasoning Shortcuts under the Independence Assumption
van Krieken, Emile, Minervini, Pasquale, Ponti, Edoardo, Vergari, Antonio
The ubiquitous independence assumption among symbolic concepts in neurosymbolic (NeSy) predictors is a convenient simplification: NeSy predictors use it to speed up probabilistic reasoning. Recent works like van Krieken et al. (2024) and Marconato et al. (2024) argued that the independence assumption can hinder learning of NeSy predictors and, more crucially, prevent them from correctly modelling uncertainty. There is, however, scepticism in the NeSy community around the scenarios in which the independence assumption actually limits NeSy systems (Faronius and Dos Martires, 2025). In this work, we settle this question by formally showing that assuming independence among symbolic concepts entails that a model can never represent uncertainty over certain concept combinations. Thus, the model fails to be aware of reasoning shortcuts, i.e., the pathological behaviour of NeSy predictors that predict correct downstream tasks but for the wrong reasons.
Causal Discovery for Linear Non-Gaussian Models with Disjoint Cycles
Drton, Mathias, Garrote-López, Marina, Nikov, Niko, Robeva, Elina, Wang, Y. Samuel
The paradigm of linear structural equation modeling readily allows one to incorporate causal feedback loops in the model specification. These appear as directed cycles in the common graphical representation of the models. However, the presence of cycles entails difficulties such as the fact that models need no longer be characterized by conditional independence relations. As a result, learning cyclic causal structures remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we offer new insights on this problem in the context of linear non-Gaussian models. First, we precisely characterize when two directed graphs determine the same linear non-Gaussian model. Next, we take up a setting of cycle-disjoint graphs, for which we are able to show that simple quadratic and cubic polynomial relations among low-order moments of a non-Gaussian distribution allow one to locate source cycles. Complementing this with a strategy of decorrelating cycles and multivariate regression allows one to infer a block-topological order among the directed cycles, which leads to a {consistent and computationally efficient algorithm} for learning causal structures with disjoint cycles.
Interpretable Bayesian Tensor Network Kernel Machines with Automatic Rank and Feature Selection
Tensor Network (TN) Kernel Machines speed up model learning by representing parameters as low-rank TNs, reducing computation and memory use. However, most TN-based Kernel methods are deterministic and ignore parameter uncertainty. Further, they require manual tuning of model complexity hyperparameters like tensor rank and feature dimensions, often through trial-and-error or computationally costly methods like cross-validation. We propose Bayesian Tensor Network Kernel Machines, a fully probabilistic framework that uses sparsity-inducing hierarchical priors on TN factors to automatically infer model complexity. This enables automatic inference of tensor rank and feature dimensions, while also identifying the most relevant features for prediction, thereby enhancing model interpretability. All the model parameters and hyperparameters are treated as latent variables with corresponding priors. Given the Bayesian approach and latent variable dependencies, we apply a mean-field variational inference to approximate their posteriors. We show that applying a mean-field approximation to TN factors yields a Bayesian ALS algorithm with the same computational complexity as its deterministic counterpart, enabling uncertainty quantification at no extra computational cost. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our model in prediction accuracy, uncertainty quantification, interpretability, and scalability.
A Simple Approximate Bayesian Inference Neural Surrogate for Stochastic Petri Net Models
Manu, Bright Kwaku, Reckell, Trevor, Sterner, Beckett, Jevtic, Petar
--Stochastic Petri Nets (SPNs) are an increasingly popular tool of choice for modeling discrete-event dynamics in areas such as epidemiology and systems biology, yet their parameter estimation remains challenging in general and in particular when transition rates depend on external covariates and explicit likelihoods are unavailable. We introduce a neural-surrogate (neural-network-based approximation of the posterior distribution) framework that predicts the coefficients of known covariate-dependent rate functions directly from noisy, partially observed token trajectories. Our model employs a lightweight 1D Convolutional Residual Network trained end-to-end on Gillespie-simulated SPN realizations, learning to invert system dynamics under realistic conditions of event dropout. During inference, Monte Carlo dropout provides calibrated uncertainty bounds together with point estimates. On synthetic SPNs with 20% missing events, our surrogate recovers rate-function coefficients with an RMSE = 0.108 and substantially runs faster than traditional Bayesian approaches. These results demonstrate that data-driven, likelihood-free surrogates can enable accurate, robust, and real-time parameter recovery in complex, partially observed discrete-event systems.