Technology
Kalshi Has Been Temporarily Banned in Nevada
A judge ordered Kalshi to immediately halt sports and election contracts in the state, intensifying a growing regulatory battle over prediction markets. Kalshi has been temporarily banned in Nevada, marking the latest escalation in the widening regulatory war over prediction markets. The First Judicial District Court of Nevada has issued a 14-day restraining order, effective immediately, barring the company from "offering a derivatives exchange and prediction market which offers event-based contracts relating to sports, election, and entertainment related events" without first obtaining gaming licenses. This is the first time a US state has forced the company to cease operations. This particular legal battle began just over a year ago, when Nevada regulators sent Kalshi a cease-and-desist letter demanding that it stop offering sports-related events contracts.
Learning Better Representations From Less Data For Propositional Satisfiability
Training neural networks on NP-complete problems typically demands very large amounts of training data and often needs to be coupled with computationally expensive symbolic verifiers to ensure output correctness. In this paper, we present NeuRes, a neuro-symbolic approach to address both challenges for propositional satisfiability, being the quintessential NP-complete problem. By combining certificate-driven training and expert iteration, our model learns better representations than models trained for classification only, with a much higher data efficiency -- requiring orders of magnitude less training data. NeuRes employs propositional resolution as a proof system to generate proofs of unsatisfiability and to accelerate the process of finding satisfying truth assignments, exploring both possibilities in parallel. To realize this, we propose an attention-based architecture that autoregressively selects pairs of clauses from a dynamic formula embedding to derive new clauses. Furthermore, we employ expert iteration whereby model-generated proofs progressively replace longer teacher proofs as the new ground truth. This enables our model to reduce a dataset of proofs generated by an advanced solver by $\sim$$32$% after training on it with no extra guidance. This shows that NeuRes is not limited by the optimality of the teacher algorithm owing to its self-improving workflow. We show that our model achieves far better performance than NeuroSAT in terms of both correctly classified and proven instances.
Estimating Generalization Performance Along the Trajectory of Proximal SGD in Robust Regression
This paper studies the generalization performance of iterates obtained by Gradient Descent (GD), Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and their proximal variants in high-dimensional robust regression problems. The number of features is comparable to the sample size and errors may be heavy-tailed. We introduce estimators that precisely track the generalization error of the iterates along the trajectory of the iterative algorithm. These estimators are provably consistent under suitable conditions. The results are illustrated through several examples, including Huber regression, pseudo-Huber regression, and their penalized variants with non-smooth regularizer. We provide explicit generalization error estimates for iterates generated from GD and SGD, or from proximal SGD in the presence of a non-smooth regularizer. The proposed risk estimates serve as effective proxies for the actual generalization error, allowing us to determine the optimal stopping iteration that minimizes the generalization error. Extensive simulations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed generalization error estimates.
STONE: A Submodular Optimization Framework for Active 3D Object Detection
A key requirement for training an accurate 3D object detector is the availability of a large amount of LiDAR-based point cloud data. Unfortunately, labeling point cloud data is extremely challenging, as accurate 3D bounding boxes and semantic labels are required for each potential object. This paper proposes a unified active 3D object detection framework, for greatly reducing the labeling cost of training 3D object detectors. Our framework is based on a novel formulation of submodular optimization, specifically tailored to the problem of active 3D object detection. In particular, we address two fundamental challenges associated with active 3D object detection: data imbalance and the need to cover the distribution of the data, including LiDAR-based point cloud data of varying difficulty levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with high computational efficiency compared to existing active learning methods. The code is available at https://github.com/RuiyuM/STONE
Identification and Estimation of the Bi-Directional MR with Some Invalid Instruments
We consider the challenging problem of estimating causal effects from purely observational data in the bi-directional Mendelian randomization (MR), where some invalid instruments, as well as unmeasured confounding, usually exist. To address this problem, most existing methods attempt to find proper valid instrumental variables (IVs) for the target causal effect by expert knowledge or by assuming that the causal model is a one-directional MR model. As such, in this paper, we first theoretically investigate the identification of the bi-directional MR from observational data. In particular, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions under which valid IV sets are correctly identified such that the bi-directional MR model is identifiable, including the causal directions of a pair of phenotypes (i.e., the treatment and outcome).Moreover, based on the identification theory, we develop a cluster fusion-like method to discover valid IV sets and estimate the causal effects of interest.We theoretically demonstrate the correctness of the proposed algorithm.Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method for estimating causal effects in both one-directional and bi-directional MR models.
Graph Neural Networks Do Not Always Oversmooth
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for processing relational data in applications. However, GNNs suffer from the problem of oversmoothing, the property that features of all nodes exponentially converge to the same vector over layers, prohibiting the design of deep GNNs. In this work we study oversmoothing in graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by using their Gaussian process (GP) equivalence in the limit of infinitely many hidden features. By generalizing methods from conventional deep neural networks (DNNs), we can describe the distribution of features at the output layer of deep GCNs in terms of a GP: as expected, we find that typical parameter choices from the literature lead to oversmoothing. The theory, however, allows us to identify a new, non-oversmoothing phase: if the initial weights of the network have sufficiently large variance, GCNs do not oversmooth, and node features remain informative even at large depth. We demonstrate the validity of this prediction in finite-size GCNs by training a linear classifier on their output. Moreover, using the linearization of the GCN GP, we generalize the concept of propagation depth of information from DNNs to GCNs.
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