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Symbolic Regression via Neural Networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Machine learning - specifically deep learning - techniques have shown their capabilities in approximating dynamics from data, but a shortcoming of traditional deep learning is that there is little insight into the underlying mapping beyond its numerical output for a given input. This limits their utility in analysis beyond simple prediction. Simultaneously, a number of strategies exist which identify models based on a fixed dictionary of basis functions, but most either require some intuition or insight about the system, or are susceptible to overfitting or a lack of parsimony. Here we present a novel approach that combines the flexibility and accuracy of deep learning approaches with the utility of symbolic solutions: a deep neural network that generates a symbolic expression for the governing equations. We first describe the architecture for our model, then show the accuracy of our algorithm across a range of classical dynamical systems. The dynamics of quantities of interest are widely modeled A number of authors have approached system identificaas differential equations, often derived from first princi-tion by fitting coefficients of a linear combination of basis 3ples. However, this is not always possible, especially whenfunctions, dating at least back to Crutchfield and McNamara . The The set of basis functions typically includes nonlinear terms, identification of models from data has seen significant ad-for example terms which would arise in a Taylor series exvances with the advent of machine learning. While deeppansion about the origin of the system3-6 or a broader class neural networks have enabled sufficient accuracy in fore-of functions7. The coefficients of the basis functions are decasting dynamic data with unprecedented versatility, thetermined through comparison of the original data points with models they represent lack closed-form expressions thatpoints from computed solutions to the fitted models. Varican be conducive to interpretation and analysis.


Perturbation is All You Need for Extrapolating Language Models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We introduce a simple yet powerful framework for training large language models. In contrast to the standard autoregressive next-token prediction based on an exact prefix, we propose a perturbation-based procedure that first transforms the prefix into a semantic neighbor and then conditions on this perturbed variant for next-token prediction. This yields a hierarchical model with a pre-post-additive noise structure. Within this framework, we develop a rigorous theory of extrapolability, namely, the capacity of a model class to make reliable predictions for token sequences that lie outside the empirical support of the training corpus. We evaluate the finite-sample performance of the proposed procedure using both synthetic and real-world language data. Results show that the proposed method consistently improves out-of-support prediction while maintaining competitive in-support performance, demonstrating that perturbation offers a practical route to language modeling.


Causal discovery under mean independence and linearity

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Causal discovery methods such as LiNGAM identify causal structure from observational data by assuming mutually independent disturbances. This assumption is fragile: shared volatility, common scale effects, or other forms of dependence can cause the methods to recover the wrong causal order, even with infinite data. We introduce the Linear Mean-Independent Acyclic Model (LiMIAM), which replaces full independence with weaker one-sided mean-independence restrictions on the disturbances. Under finite-order consequences of these restrictions, source nodes are generically identifiable, and hence a compatible causal order can be recovered recursively. Our proof is constructive and leads to DirectLiMIAM, a sequential residual-based algorithm for causal discovery under dependent noise. In simulations with mean-independent but dependent disturbances, DirectLiMIAM outperforms LiNGAM methods. A large-scale empirical application to the oil market highlights the implausibility of the independence assumption and the ability of DirectLiMIAM to recover a realistic causal ordering, from policy to production and from prices to inflation.


Augmented transfer regression learning for completely missing covariates

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Large-scale population-level datasets, such as the UK Biobank and the All of Us Research Program, often lack covariates needed for a specific analysis, such as genetic or lifestyle measures, while related studies measure them. This creates a cross-population missing data problem in which covariates are completely unobserved in the target population, rather than partially missing within one dataset. We propose an augmented transfer regression learning method for this setting. The key identifying condition is a sub-population shift assumption: the joint distribution of the outcome and observed covariates may differ across source and target populations, but the conditional distribution of the missing covariates given observed variables is invariant. We combine importance-weighted estimating equations with imputation terms for first- and second-order moments of the missing covariates. The resulting estimator is doubly robust, remaining consistent if either the density ratio model or both imputation models are correctly specified. It is $n^{1/2}$-consistent and asymptotically normal, and attains the semiparametric efficiency bound when both nuisance models are correctly specified.


FL-Sailer: Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning for Scalable Single-Cell Epigenetic Data Analysis via Adaptive Sampling

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Single-cell ATAC-seq (scATAC-seq) enables high-resolution mapping of chromatin accessibility, yet privacy regulations and data size constraints hinder multi-institutional sharing. Federated learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving alternative, but faces three fundamental barriers in scATAC-seq analysis: ultra-high dimensionality, extreme sparsity, and severe cross-institutional heterogeneity. We propose FL-Sailer, the first FL framework designed for scATAC-seq data. FL-Sailer integrates two key innovations: (i) adaptive leverage score sampling, which selects biologically interpretable features while reducing dimensionality by 80%, and (ii) an invariant VAE architecture, which disentangles biological signals from technical confounders via mutual information minimization. We provide a convergence guarantee, showing that FL-Sailer converges to an approximate solution of the original high-dimensional problem with bounded error. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real epigenomic datasets demonstrate that FL-Sailer not only enables previously infeasible multi-institutional collaborations but also surpasses centralized methods by leveraging adaptive sampling as an implicit regularizer to suppress technical noise. Our work establishes that federated learning, when tailored to domain-specific challenges, can become a superior paradigm for collaborative epigenomic research.


From Video-to-PDE: Data-Driven Discovery of Nonlinear Dye Plume Dynamics

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Inferring continuum models directly from video is hampered by two facts: the recorded field is uncalibrated image intensity rather than a physical state, and direct numerical differentiation of noisy frames is unstable. We develop a video-to-PDE pipeline that converts grayscale recordings of an ink plume into a normalised scalar field $u(x,y,t)$, isolates a bulk drift $\mathbf{v}(t)$ from intrinsic spreading via the intensity-weighted centroid, and identifies an effective transport law by weak-form sparse regression. Conditioning, threshold-sweep and random-centre diagnostics show that overcomplete libraries are strongly collinear; the search is therefore restricted to compact gradient-based libraries. Coefficients are refined by an inverse physics-informed network and recalibrated against forward rollouts, with a chronological block bootstrap quantifying uncertainty. The selected reduced model $u_t+\mathbf v(t)\!\cdot\!\nabla u = 9.005\,|\nabla u|^{2}+0.666\,Δu$ outperforms advection--diffusion baselines on held-out frames, retains a positive Laplacian coefficient, and admits a Cole--Hopf reduction to a linear advection--diffusion equation. The framework demonstrates that uncalibrated visual data can yield compact, predictive and structurally interpretable continuum models when discovery, calibration and uncertainty are treated as distinct stages.


Confirmation of Binary Clustering in Gamma-Ray Bursts through an Integrated $p$-value from Multiple Nonparametric Tests of Hypotheses

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The paper applies a new, nonparametric, interpoint distance-based measure to confirm the inherent groups prevailing in the brightest source of light in the universe: gamma-ray bursts. Our effective metric, in association with clustering methods like Gaussian-mixture model-based and $K$-means algorithms, resolves the conflict regarding the possibility about existence of more than binary clusters in the gamma-ray burst population. Here we carry out multiple nonparametric statistical tests of hypotheses, as many as the number of bursts available from the `BATSE' catalog. An integrated $p$-value achieved from the aforesaid dependent tests solves our concern confirming two groups of short and long bursts.


PAIR-CI: Calibrated Conditional Independence Testing for Causal Discovery with Incomplete Data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The standard constraint-based paradigm for causal discovery with incomplete data -- impute first, test second -- is frequently miscalibrated: any consistent conditional independence (CI) test rejects a true null with probability approaching 1 when imputation error induces spurious conditional dependence. We introduce PAIR-CI, a nonparametric CI test that restores calibration by integrating multiple imputation directly into the inferential procedure via a paired permutation design. PAIR-CI compares cross-validated models that include and exclude the candidate variable while receiving the same imputed conditioning set, forcing imputation error to cancel in their loss difference rather than contaminate the test statistic. A provably consistent variance estimator jointly accounts for uncertainty arising from cross-validation and multiple imputation -- to our knowledge, the first formal unification of these two inferential frameworks. In simulations, existing imputation-based CI tests exhibit false positive rates of 28--45% when data are missing not at random (MNAR), whereas PAIR-CI averages below the nominal 5% level across data-generating processes and missingness mechanisms. These gains are largest in nonlinear settings and grow with causal graph size: when integrated into the PC algorithm, PAIR-CI reduces structural Hamming distance by 8% on 10-variable nonlinear graphs, 15% on 30-variable equivalents, and up to 44% on the 56-variable HAILFINDER network, with stable performance in all settings.


Self-Attention as Transport: Limits of Symmetric Spectral Diagnostics

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Large language models hallucinate in predictable ways: attention routing fails by over-concentrating on a narrow set of positions, or by spreading so diffusely that relevance is diluted, and the shape of the failure carries diagnostic signal. A widely used family of spectral methods analyzes the symmetric component of the degree-normalized attention operator, which governs transport capacity; we prove that every transpose-invariant spectral diagnostic of this operator is structurally orientation-blind (it cannot distinguish an operator from its transpose, and therefore cannot detect information-flow direction), with a quantitative converse establishing the asymmetry coefficient $G$ as the unique control parameter for direction. Pairing this with a closed-form bipartite-Cheeger landscape for canonical causal architectures, we show that uniform causal attention satisfies an $n$-independent floor $ϕ\ge 1/5$ with worst cut at $t^\ast/n \approx 0.32$, while window attention pierces the floor as $O(w/n)$; failure modes are shape-different, not just value-different. The resulting two-axis diagnostic ($ϕ$ for capacity, $G$ for direction) yields a falsifiable polarity prediction: bottleneck- and diffuse-dominated benchmarks should exhibit opposite polarity. Under length-controlled evaluation, transport features retain interpretable signal (LC-AUROC from 0.62 to 0.84) on tested models up to 8B parameters, with polarity reversing as predicted between HaluEval and MedHallu.


Regime-Conditioned Evaluation in Multi-Context Bayesian Optimization

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Published transfer-BO comparisons often estimate an average treatment effect of acquisition choice over hidden regime variables, while practitioners need the conditional effect for their specific prior quality, budget ratio, and metric. An audit of 40 transfer-BO papers from NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AISTATS, UAI, TMLR, JMLR, and AutoML-Conf (2022-2025) finds that 98% never vary B/|A| as a controlled axis. On the same GDSC2 benchmark, changing only the budget reverses the ranking: at B=50, Greedy outperforms UCB by 0.050 Hit@1, while at B=100, UCB outperforms Greedy by 0.035. We capture this transition with the Portable Regime Score PRS=(B/|A|)(1-rho), where rho is the prior rank correlation and can be estimated from pilot contexts before the main comparison. Across 79 conditions spanning chemistry, drug-response biology, and HPO, a hierarchical model gives beta=0.50 (p=1.1e-9), and 19% of conditions fall in an equivalence zone where |advantage|<0.01 Hit@1. In five published reversal cases, PRS predicts the winner from pre-comparison observables. A No-Free-Leaderboard proposition explains why unconditional rankings are unstable: when CATE changes sign across regimes, the reported ATE becomes a function of benchmark mixture. RegimePlanner, which estimates rho online and switches acquisition accordingly, wins all 16 HPO-B search spaces at B=100 and exceeds the matched {Greedy,UCB} per-context oracle on GDSC2 by 18%. Pre-registered predictions achieve 27/40=67.5% overall accuracy and above 90% within EMA prior families. The practical protocol is simple: report B/|A|, rho, K, and metric alongside any claimed acquisition advantage.