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Bandit Quickest Changepoint Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Surveillance systems [HC11] are equipped with a suite of sensors that can be switched and steered to focus attention on any target or location over a physical landscape (see Figure 1) to detect abrupt changes at any location. On the other hand, sensor suites are resource limited, and only a limited subset, among all the locations, can be probed at any time.




Score-Based Change-Point Detection and Region Localization for Spatio-Temporal Point Processes

Zhou, Wenbin, Xie, Liyan, Zhu, Shixiang

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study sequential change-point detection for spatio-temporal point processes, where actionable detection requires not only identifying when a distributional change occurs but also localizing where it manifests in space. While classical quickest change detection methods provide strong guarantees on detection delay and false-alarm rates, existing approaches for point-process data predominantly focus on temporal changes and do not explicitly infer affected spatial regions. We propose a likelihood-free, score-based detection framework that jointly estimates the change time and the change region in continuous space-time without assuming parametric knowledge of the pre- or post-change dynamics. The method leverages a localized and conditionally weighted Hyvärinen score to quantify event-level deviations from nominal behavior and aggregates these scores using a spatio-temporal CUSUM-type statistic over a prescribed class of spatial regions. Operating sequentially, the procedure outputs both a stopping time and an estimated change region, enabling real-time detection with spatial interpretability. We establish theoretical guarantees on false-alarm control, detection delay, and spatial localization accuracy, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through simulations and real-world spatio-temporal event data.


RoS-Guard: Robust and Scalable Online Change Detection with Delay-Optimal Guarantees

Zhu, Zelin, Huang, Yancheng, Yang, Kai

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Online change detection (OCD) aims to rapidly identify change points in streaming data and is critical in applications such as power system monitoring, wireless network sensing, and financial anomaly detection. Existing OCD methods typically assume precise system knowledge, which is unrealistic due to estimation errors and environmental variations. Moreover, existing OCD methods often struggle with efficiency in large-scale systems. To overcome these challenges, we propose RoS-Guard, a robust and optimal OCD algorithm tailored for linear systems with uncertainty. Through a tight relaxation and reformulation of the OCD optimization problem, RoS-Guard employs neural unrolling to enable efficient parallel computation via GPU acceleration. The algorithm provides theoretical guarantees on performance, including expected false alarm rate and worst-case average detection delay. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of RoS-Guard and demonstrate significant computational speedup in large-scale system scenarios.


Conditional Score Learning for Quickest Change Detection in Markov Transition Kernels

Chen, Wuxia, Banerjee, Taposh, Tarokh, Vahid

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We address the problem of quickest change detection in Markov processes with unknown transition kernels. The key idea is to learn the conditional score $\nabla_{\mathbf{y}} \log p(\mathbf{y}|\mathbf{x})$ directly from sample pairs $( \mathbf{x},\mathbf{y})$, where both $\mathbf{x}$ and $\mathbf{y}$ are high-dimensional data generated by the same transition kernel. In this way, we avoid explicit likelihood evaluation and provide a practical way to learn the transition dynamics. Based on this estimation, we develop a score-based CUSUM procedure that uses conditional Hyvarinen score differences to detect changes in the kernel. To ensure bounded increments, we propose a truncated version of the statistic. With Hoeffding's inequality for uniformly ergodic Markov processes, we prove exponential lower bounds on the mean time to false alarm. We also prove asymptotic upper bounds on detection delay. These results give both theoretical guarantees and practical feasibility for score-based detection in high-dimensional Markov models.


M-Statistic for Kernel Change-Point Detection

Shuang Li, Yao Xie, Hanjun Dai, Le Song

Neural Information Processing Systems

Detecting the emergence of an abrupt change-point is a classic problem in statistics and machine learning. Kernel-based nonparametric statistics have been proposed for this task which make fewer assumptions on the distributions than traditional parametric approach. However, none of the existing kernel statistics has provided a computationally efficient way to characterize the extremal behavior of the statistic. Such characterization is crucial for setting the detection threshold, to control the significance level in the offline case as well as the average run length in the online case. In this paper we propose two related computationally efficient M -statistics for kernel-based change-point detection when the amount of background data is large. A novel theoretical result of the paper is the characterization of the tail probability of these statistics using a new technique based on change-of-measure. Such characterization provides us accurate detection thresholds for both offline and online cases in computationally efficient manner, without the need to resort to the more expensive simulations such as bootstrapping. We show that our methods perform well in both synthetic and real world data.


Technical note on Sequential Test-Time Adaptation via Martingale-Driven Fisher Prompting

Khan, Behraj, Syed, Tahir Qasim

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We present a theoretical framework for M-FISHER, a method for sequential distribution shift detection and stable adaptation in streaming data. For detection, we construct an exponential martingale from non-conformity scores and apply Ville's inequality to obtain time-uniform guarantees on false alarm control, ensuring statistical validity at any stopping time. Under sustained shifts, we further bound the expected detection delay as $\mathcal{O}(\log(1/δ)/Γ)$, where $Γ$ reflects the post-shift information gain, thereby linking detection efficiency to distributional divergence. For adaptation, we show that Fisher-preconditioned updates of prompt parameters implement natural gradient descent on the distributional manifold, yielding locally optimal updates that minimize KL divergence while preserving stability and parameterization invariance. Together, these results establish M-FISHER as a principled approach for robust, anytime-valid detection and geometrically stable adaptation in sequential decision-making under covariate shift.



On Multi-entity, Multivariate Quickest Change Point Detection

Kor, Bahar, Gaikwad, Bipin, Patra, Abani, Miller, Eric L.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We propose a framework for online Change Point Detection (CPD) from multi-entity, multivariate time series data, motivated by applications in crowd monitoring where traditional sensing methods (e.g., video surveillance) may be infeasible. Our approach addresses the challenge of detecting system-wide behavioral shifts in complex, dynamic environments where the number and behavior of individual entities may be uncertain or evolve. We introduce the concept of Individual Deviation from Normality (IDfN), computed via a reconstruction-error-based autoencoder trained on normal behavior. We aggregate these individual deviations using mean, variance, and Kernel Density Estimates (KDE) to yield a System-Wide Anomaly Score (SWAS). To detect persistent or abrupt changes, we apply statistical deviation metrics and the Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) technique to these scores. Our unsupervised approach eliminates the need for labeled data or feature extraction, enabling real-time operation on streaming input. Evaluations on both synthetic datasets and crowd simulations, explicitly designed for anomaly detection in group behaviors, demonstrate that our method accurately detects significant system-level changes, offering a scalable and privacy-preserving solution for monitoring complex multi-agent systems. In addition to this methodological contribution, we introduce new, challenging multi-entity multivariate time series datasets generated from crowd simulations in Unity and coupled nonlinear oscillators. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no publicly available dataset of this type designed explicitly to evaluate CPD in complex collective and interactive systems, highlighting an essential gap that our work addresses.