Gaussian graphical models in the spectral domain offer a principled approach for recovering conditional dependence structures in stationary high-dimensional time series. Inference on the spectral precision matrix at a fixed frequency enables tests of frequency-specific conditional associations among time series components. The problem is challenging because finite-sample discrete Fourier transforms induce truncation and smoothing biases, while the complex-valued nature of the spectral precision matrix complicates high-dimensional variance estimation, rendering methods for i.i.d. samples not directly applicable. Existing approaches do not provide full likelihood-based inference for the discrete Fourier transforms. We propose a high-dimensional inference framework for sparse spectral precision matrices using the full likelihood of neighboring discrete Fourier transforms. We construct a debiased complex graphical lasso estimator at any fixed frequency. Using asymptotic theory for quadratic forms of multivariate time series, we establish its asymptotic normality and construct entry-wise consistent covariance estimators by aggregating information across neighboring frequencies. The key theoretical contribution is the simultaneous control of regularization, finite-sample truncation, and smoothing biases, enabling valid inference. Simulation studies show reliable coverage away from zero frequency and improved detection power over the benchmark, with false discovery rates near the desired level.

Evolve-based agent such as AlphaEvolve is one of the notable successes in using Large Language Models (LLMs) to build AI Scientists. These agents tackle open-ended scientific problems by iteratively improving and evolving programs, leveraging the prior knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Despite the success, existing evolve-based agents lack targeted guidance for evolution and effective mechanisms for organizing and utilizing knowledge acquired from past evolutionary experience. Consequently, they suffer from decreasing evolution efficiency and exhibit oscillatory behavior when approaching known performance boundaries. To mitigate the gap, we develop CausalEvolve, equipped with a causal scratchpad that leverages LLMs to identify and reason about guiding factors for evolution. At the beginning, CausalEvolve first identifies outcome-level factors that offer complementary inspirations in improving the target objective. During the evolution, CausalEvolve also inspects surprise patterns during the evolution and abductive reasoning to hypothesize new factors, which in turn offer novel directions. Through comprehensive experiments, we show that CausalEvolve effectively improves the evolutionary efficiency and discovers better solutions in 4 challenging open-ended scientific tasks.

Ontheotherhand,wefindthatstrong regularization is not necessary for learning high-quality feature representations.

Thus a gap has arisen between theory and practice.

In 1weintroduce ourmotivations, ourmain results and discuss the related work.

By identifying an instrumental variable correlated with the variableX butunrelated tothe confounders, researchers can isolate the exogenous variation inX and estimate acausal relationship betweenX andY.

Thepresence of multiple structural states in the data represents a major bottleneck in existing processing pipelines, often requiring expert user supervision.