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British Police Built a Sprawling Crime-Prediction Machine. Some Results Couldn't Be Trusted

WIRED

British Police Built a Sprawling Crime-Prediction Machine. Some Results Couldn't Be Trusted As UK police embrace the AI revolution, a WIRED investigation reveals the messy inside story of one region's experiment with predictive analytics. The Think Family Database holds records on close to half a million people who live in the city of Bristol, England. For many years, few of them knew anything about it. Launched in 2016 by the Bristol City Council and the regional Avon and Somerset Police, the database has stored all manner of sensitive information--police intelligence reports, housing status, mental health records, teenage pregnancies, enrollment in parenting courses, free school meals. On top of this sensitive data, officials built machine-learning models to assign scores to thousands of adults and children. They hoped to build what they called a "picture of threat, harm, and risk" in the region. At an event in early 2022 to help officials tackle child exploitation crimes, one police data scientist described part of the approach this way: "I essentially dump all that data in a big bucket and stir it with a data-science spatula, and we come out with a lovely risk score for everybody." This risk scoring inside the Think Family Database was just one part of Avon and Somerset Police's sprawling predictive analytics program.


Tree-Based Premise Selection for Lean4

Neural Information Processing Systems

Premise selection is a critical bottleneck in interactive theorem proving, particularly with large libraries. Existing methods, primarily relying on semantic embeddings, often fail to effectively leverage the rich structural information inherent in mathematical expressions. This paper proposes a novel framework for premise selection based on the structure of expression trees. The framework enhances premise selection ability by explicitly utilizing the structural information of Lean expressions and by means of the simplified tree representation obtained via common subexpression elimination. Our method employs a multi-stage filtering pipeline, incorporating structure-aware similarity measures including the Weisfeiler-Lehman kernel, tree edit distance, $\texttt{Const}$ node Jaccard similarity, and collapse-match similarity. An adaptive fusion strategy combines these metrics for refined ranking. To handle large-scale data efficiently, we incorporate cluster-based search space optimization and structural compatibility constraints. Comprehensive evaluation on a large theorem library extracted from Mathlib4 demonstrates that our method significantly outperforms existing premise retrieval tools across various metrics. Experimental analysis, including ablation studies and parameter sensitivity analysis, validates the contribution of individual components and highlights the efficacy of our structure-aware approach and multi-metric fusion.


FlowNet Modeling Dynamic Temporal Systems via Flow Propagation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Accurately modeling complex dynamic spatio-temporal systems requires capturing flow-mediated interdependencies and context-sensitive interaction dynamics. Existing methods, predominantly graph-based or attention-driven, rely on similaritydriven connectivity assumptions, neglecting asymmetric flow exchanges that govern system evolution. We propose Spatio-Temporal Flow, a physics-inspired paradigm that explicitly models dynamic node couplings through quantifiable flow transfers governed by conservation principles. Building on this, we design FlowNet, a novel architecture leveraging flow tokens as information carriers to simulate source-todestination transfers via Flow Allocation Modules, ensuring state redistribution aligns with conservation laws. FlowNet dynamically adjusts the interaction radius through an Adaptive Spatial Masking module, suppressing irrelevant noise while enabling context-aware propagation. A cascaded architecture enhances scalability and nonlinear representation capacity. Experiments demonstrate that FlowNet significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches on seven metrics in the modeling of three real-world systems, validating its efficiency and physical interpretability. We establish a principled methodology for modeling complex systems through spatio-temporal flow interactions.


Ultrametric Cluster Hierarchies: IWant'em All!

Neural Information Processing Systems

Hierarchical clustering is a powerful tool for exploratory data analysis, organizing data into a tree of clusterings from which a partition can be chosen. This paper generalizes these ideas by proving that, for any reasonable hierarchy, one can optimally solve any center-based clustering objective over it (such as k-means). Moreover, these solutions can be found exceedingly quickly and are themselves necessarily hierarchical. Thus, given a cluster tree, we show that one can quickly access a plethora of new, equally meaningful hierarchies. Just as in standard hierarchical clustering, one can then choose any desired partition from these new hierarchies. We conclude by verifying the utility of our proposed techniques across datasets, hierarchies, and partitioning schemes.


7813e19a86fd73d40f7e811ab15f6d5f-Paper-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Long-separated research has been conducted on two highly correlated tracks: traffic and incidents. Traffic track witnesses complicating deep learning models, e.g., to push the prediction a few percent more accurate, and the incident track only studies the incidents alone, e.g., to infer the incident risk. We, for the first time, spatiotemporally aligned the two tracks in a large-scale region (16,972 traffic nodes) from year 2022 to 2024: our TraffiDent dataset includes traffic, i.e., time-series indexes on traffic flow, lane occupancy, and average vehicle speed, and incident, whose records are spatiotemporally aligned with traffic data, with seven different incident classes. Additionally, each node includes detailed physical and policylevel meta-attributes of lanes. Previous datasets typically contain only traffic or incident data in isolation, limiting research to general forecasting tasks.


ChromFound: Towards AUniversal Foundation Model for Single-Cell Chromatin Accessibility Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

The advent of single-cell Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin using sequencing (scATAC-seq) offers an innovative perspective for deciphering regulatory mechanisms by assembling a vast repository of single-cell chromatin accessibility data. While foundation models have achieved significant success in single-cell transcriptomics, there is currently no foundation model for scATAC-seq that supports zero-shot high-quality cell identification and comprehensive multi-omics analysis simultaneously. Key challenges lie in the high dimensionality and sparsity of scATAC-seq data, as well as the lack of a standardized schema for representing open chromatin regions (OCRs). Here, we present ChromFound, a foundation model tailored for scATAC-seq. ChromFound utilizes a hybrid architecture and genome-aware tokenization to effectively capture genome-wide long contexts and regulatory signals from dynamic chromatin landscapes. Pretrained on 1.97 million cells from 30 tissues and 6 disease conditions, ChromFound demonstrates broad applicability across 6 diverse tasks. Notably, it achieves robust zero-shot performance in generating universal cell representations and exhibits excellent transferability in cell type annotation and cross-omics prediction. By uncovering enhancer-gene links undetected by existing computational methods, ChromFound offers a promising framework for understanding disease risk variants in the noncoding genome.


New Parallel and Streaming Algorithms for Directed Densest Subgraph

Neural Information Processing Systems

Finding dense subgraphs is a fundamental problem with applications to community detection, clustering, and data mining. Our work focuses on finding approximate densest subgraphs in directed graphs in computational models for processing massive data. We consider two such models: Massively Parallel Computation (MPC) and semi-streaming. We show how to find a (2+ε)-approximation in O( logn) MPC rounds with sublinear memory per machine.


Transfer Learning on Edge Connecting Probability Estimation Under Graphon Model

Neural Information Processing Systems

Graphon models provide a flexible nonparametric framework for estimating latent connectivity probabilities in networks, enabling a range of downstream applications such as link prediction and data augmentation. However, accurate graphon estimation typically requires a large graph, whereas in practice, one often only observes a small-sized network. One approach to addressing this issue is to adopt a transfer learning framework, which aims to improve estimation in a small target graph by leveraging structural information from a larger, related source graph. In this paper, we propose a novel method, namely GTRANS, a transfer learning framework that integrates neighborhood smoothing and Gromov-Wasserstein optimal transport to align and transfer structural patterns between graphs. To prevent negative transfer, GTRANS includes an adaptive debiasing mechanism that identifies and corrects for target-specific deviations via residual smoothing. We provide theoretical guarantees on the stability of the estimated alignment matrix and demonstrate the effectiveness of GTRANS in improving the accuracy of target graph estimation through extensive synthetic and real data experiments. These improvements translate directly to enhanced performance in downstream applications, such as the graph classification task and the link prediction task.


The Temporal Graph of Bitcoin Transactions

Neural Information Processing Systems

Since its 2009 genesis block, the Bitcoin network has processed >1.08 billion (B) transactions representing >8.72BBTC, offering rich potential for machine learning (ML); yet, its pseudonymity and obscured flow of funds inherent in its UTxO-based design, have rendered this data largely inaccessible for ML research. Addressing this gap, we present an ML-compatible graph modeling the Bitcoin's economic topology by reconstructing the flow of funds. This temporal, heterogeneous graph encompasses complete transaction history up to block 863000, consisting of >2.4B nodes and >39.72B edges. Additionally, we provide custom sampling methods yielding node and edge feature vectors of sampled communities, tools to load and analyze the Bitcoin graph data within specialized graph databases, and ready-to-use database snapshots. This comprehensive dataset and toolkit empower the ML community to tackle Bitcoin's intricate ecosystem at scale, driving progress in applications such as anomaly detection, address classification, market analysis, and large-scale graph ML benchmarking.


Contextual Online Pricing with (Biased) Offline Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study contextual online pricing with biased offline data. For the scalar price elasticity case, we identify the instance-dependent quantity δ2 that measures how far the offline data lies from the (unknown) online optimum. We show that the time length T, bias bound V, size N and dispersion λmin(ˆΣ) of the offline data, and δ2 jointly determine the statistical complexity.