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Fourier Feature Methods for Nonlinear Causal Discovery: FFML Scoring, TRFF Scoring, and FFCI Testing in Mixed Data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Gaussian process (GP) marginal likelihood scores and kernel conditional independence tests are theoretically appealing for nonlinear causal discovery but computationally prohibitive at scale. We present three complementary RFF-based methods forming a practical toolkit for score-based, constraint-based, and hybrid causal discovery. The Fourier Feature Marginal Likelihood (FFML) score approximates the exact GP marginal likelihood by replacing the $n x n$ kernel Gram matrix with a finite-dimensional feature representation, reducing cost to $O(nm^2 + m^3)$ while retaining the probabilistic interpretation and automatic complexity penalty of the exact score. FFML extends to mixed (continuous and discrete) parent sets via a product-kernel construction, with a Kronecker path for small discrete parent sets and a Hadamard-product path otherwise. The Tetrad Random Fourier Feature (TRFF) score is a complementary BIC-style alternative using penalized Student-t regression with random Fourier features. TRFF offers robustness to heavy-tailed noise and faster runtime than FFML. Empirically, TRFF and FFML exhibit a complementary precision-recall profile: TRFF achieves higher precision while FFML achieves better recall and lower SHD overall. The Fourier Feature Conditional Independence (FFCI) test is a fast nonparametric CI test for mixed data, using ridge residualization in feature space and a Frobenius-norm cross-covariance statistic approximated as a weighted sum of chi-squared variables. Empirically, BOSS+FFML achieves the lowest SHD on nonlinear data, while BOSS+TRFF offers the highest precision. When run through PC-Max, FFCI and RCIT exhibit complementary precision-recall profiles: RCIT is more precise while FFCI achieves better recall and substantially lower SHD, at approximately twice the runtime.


5 Windows Defender settings I change ASAP on any new PC

PCWorld

PCWorld outlines five essential Windows Defender configuration changes to optimize security and performance on new Windows PCs. Key adjustments include disabling redundant system tray icons, turning off unnecessary "no threats found" notifications, and enabling Controlled Folder Access for ransomware protection. Strategic exclusions for trusted files and adjusting Core Isolation settings can improve performance while maintaining robust built-in antivirus protection. Windows Defender is a capable antivirus solution built into Windows itself. Unless you've installed a different antivirus program on your Windows 11 or Windows 10 PC, your PC is using it right now.


SHIFT: Robust Double Machine Learning for Average Dose-Response Functions under Heavy-Tailed Contamination

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Double-machine-learning pipelines for the Average Dose-Response Function rely on kernel-weighted local-linear smoothers, which inherit unbounded functional influence: a single outlier within a kernel window biases the curve across the entire window. We introduce SHIFT (Self-calibrated Heavy-tail Inlier-Fit with Tempering), a robust DML estimator combining cross-fit nuisance orthogonalization with a kernel-local Welsch-loss second stage optimized by Graduated Non-Convexity, and -- the principal design choice -- a defensive OLS refit whose inlier cutoff is scaled by post-GNC residual MAD rather than the raw-outcome MAD. On a localized-contamination stress test at $p=0.25$ this design choice drops level-RMSE from 1.03 to 0.33 while leaving clean and uniformly-contaminated runs unchanged. Across 1,400 main-sweep fits, SHIFT has competitive worst-case shape recovery (RMSE $0.325$ at $p=0.25$, second to Huber-DML's $0.276$); among the three methods with worst-case RMSE below $0.35$, only SHIFT emits a non-uniform per-sample weight vector, recovering the ground-truth outlier mask at mean $F_1 \approx 0.96$ (range $0.945$--$0.968$) on Gaussian-jump DGPs. We pair the estimator with a six-technique Extreme Value Theory diagnostic suite (Hill, GPD-MLE/PWM, GEV, Mean Excess, parameter stability, causal tail coefficient) that lets a practitioner distinguish Frechet from Weibull regimes and choose between SHIFT and L1 alternatives on empirical grounds. Extensions to binary-treatment CATE (Huber pseudo-outcome X-Learner) and time-series ADRF (block-CV + rolling MAD) are included. A counter-intuitive ablation: linear nuisance models (Ridge, Lasso) outperform gradient-boosted nuisances for robust DML under uniform contamination, inverting the usual more-flexible-is-better heuristic.


OpenAI Enables Marketing Cookies by Default for Free ChatGPT Users

WIRED

ChatGPT's new privacy policy states how the company uses cookies for tracking, to turn free users into paying subscribers. OpenAI is ready to target free users of its services with advertisements around the web, based on what it knows about them. On Thursday, OpenAI sent an email to users laying out major changes to the AI company's privacy policy in the US. "We'll now use cookies to promote OpenAI products and services on other websites," reads the email sent on April 30. "This does not impact your conversations in ChatGPT. Your conversations with ChatGPT are private and are not shared with marketing partners."


Bayesian X-Learner: Calibrated Posterior Inference for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects under Heavy-Tailed Outcomes

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) estimation in practice demands three properties simultaneously: heterogeneous effects ฯ„(x), calibrated uncertainty over them, and robustness to the heavy tails that contaminate real outcome data. Meta-learners (Kรผnzel et al., 2019) give (i); causal forests and BART give (i)-(ii) with Gaussian-tail assumptions; no widely used tool gives all three. We present Bayesian X-Learner, an X-Learner built on cross-fitted doubly robust pseudo-outcomes (Kennedy, 2020) with a full MCMC posterior over ฯ„(x) via a Welsch redescending pseudo-likelihood. On Hill's IHDP benchmark the default configuration attains mean ฮตPEHE = 0.56 on 5 replications (lowest mean; differences from S-/T-/X-learners, full-config Causal BART, and a causal forest baseline are not significant at ฮฑ = 0.05, and rank ordering is unstable at 10 replications -- IHDP comparisons are competitive rather than dominant). On contaminated "whale" DGPs with up to 20-25% tail density, a one-flag extension (contamination_severity) that selects a Huberฮด nuisance loss per Huber's minimax-ฮด relation recovers RMSE 0.13 with tight credible intervals (single-cross-fit 30-seed coverage 83% [Wilson 66%, 93%] at 20% density; modularBayes pooling with Bayesian-bootstrap nuisance draws restores nominal 95% coverage). We validate on the Hillstrom email-marketing RCT (N = 42,613), demonstrating consistent behaviour on real heavy-tailed outcome data, and report covariate-stratified ฯ„(x) coverage across covariate quintiles to substantiate calibration for heterogeneous effects beyond scalar summaries. We draw a clean distinction between tails-as-contamination (handled by Welsch + Huber nuisance) and tails-as-signal (handled by a tail-aware CATE basis); an empirical probe confirms a tail-aware basis recovers ฯ„tail with full subgroup coverage, while the library's Hill-estimator path is contamination-directed and should not be used for heterogeneous ฯ„. We map six empirical boundaries (contamination ceiling, clean-data efficiency cost, basis sensitivity, sample size, treatment type, compute) and show where other tools are preferable. Code and reproducible benchmarks are released.



259a5df46308d60f8454bd4adcc3b462-Supplemental-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

As action decoder their mentioned architectures of is multimodal adopted in the in to paper Figure information generate, the 1. visual-gr natural with languages cross-attention ounded alignment conditioned blocks, decoder on while the is visual applied the visual-grounded input. Based on these deeply fused representations, we finally generate the predicted answers with the visual-grounded generation decoder. In this section, we describe the settings used when fine-tuning the pretrained models on various downstream tasks. We use RandomAugment [1] for data augmentation. The default settings for finetuning on each dataset are shown in Table 1.


Supplementary

Neural Information Processing Systems

Contents1 1 PrinCut 22 1.1 How to use PrinCut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Do not distribute. 1 PrinCut22 1.1 How to use PrinCut23 The PrinCut GUI is shown in Figure 1. PrinCut is a MATLAB app, and its package is also provided24 in the supplementary. The left shows raw data without annotation. The right shows both raw data and annotation overlay.


Hierarchy-Guided Topology Latent Flow for Molecular Graph Generation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Generating chemically valid 3D molecules is hindered by discrete bond topology: small local bond errors can cause global failures (valence violations, disconnections, implausible rings), especially for drug-like molecules with long-range constraints. Many unconditional 3D generators emphasize coordinates and then infer bonds or rely on post-processing, leaving topology feasibility weakly controlled. We propose Hierarchy-Guided Latent Topology Flow (HLTF), a planner-executor model that generates bond graphs with 3D coordinates, using a latent multi-scale plan for global context and a constraint-aware sampler to suppress topology-driven failures. On QM9, HLTF achieves 98.8% atom stability and 92.9% valid-and-unique, improving PoseBusters validity to 94.0% (+0.9 over the strongest reported baseline). On GEOM-DRUGS, HLTF attains 85.5%/85.0% validity/valid-unique-novel without post-processing and 92.2%/91.2% after standardized relaxation, within 0.9 points of the best post-processed baseline. Explicit topology generation also reduces "false-valid" samples that pass RDKit sanitization but fail stricter checks.