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 disentanglement


Interpretable Discriminative Text Representations via Agreement and Label Disentanglement

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Interpretable text representations should expose coordinates that are not only predictive, but also meaningful enough for independent auditors to apply. Existing discriminative representations often use anonymous embedding directions, while concept-bottleneck and LLM-assisted methods attach natural-language names to features without ensuring that those definitions are reproducible or distinct from the target label. We propose an operational criterion for interpretable discriminative text representations: each coordinate should satisfy conceptual clarity, measured by chance-adjusted agreement between independent annotators applying the feature definition, and label disentanglement, meaning the feature should not merely paraphrase the prediction target. We instantiate this criterion in LLM-assisted Feature Discovery (LFD), an iterative method that proposes lexical and semantic features from contrastive outcome-opposed text pairs, screens candidates using cross-LLM Cohen's $ฮบ$, and selects features by residual held-out predictive gain. A stylized analysis connects the $ฮบ$ screen to a per-feature annotation-noise bound, formalizing agreement as a reliability check. Across ten text-classification tasks spanning seven corpora, LFD matches the predictive performance of a strong text bottleneck baseline while producing substantially clearer and less label-entangled features. Human audits with 232 raters show that LFD features achieve higher human--human and human--LLM agreement than baseline concepts, and raters consistently judge them as less label-leaking. These results suggest that agreement-tested, label-disentangled coordinates provide a practical auditability standard for interpretable text classification.


Finite-size scaling of hetero-associative retrieval in continuous-signal-driven Ising spin systems

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Kosko's Bidirectional Associative Memory [17] first formalised this idea for two layers, showing that stable recallContent-addressable memory--the recovery of a complete stored record from a partial or degraded cue--is aarises from the same energy-descent principle as in Hopcornerstone of neural computation and a paradigmaticfield networks but across two distinct pattern spaces: a problem in the statistical mechanics of disordered sys-cue presented to one layer drives the other toward the tems. The Hopfield model [1] demonstrated that binarymatching stored pattern, enabling cross-modal compleNtion. Multi-species spin-glass analyses [18] subsequentlypatterns in { 1,+1} can be stored as fixed-point attractors of an energy landscape shaped by Hebbian couplings, provided a rigorous thermodynamic foundation for arwhile Little's earlier stochastic formulation [2] cast thechitectures with an arbitrary number of interacting popsame architecture in the language of equilibrium statisti-ulations, generalising the classical single-species phase cal mechanics through parallel probabilistic updates.


End-to-End Identifiable and Consistent Recurrent Switching Dynamical Systems

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Learning identifiable representations in deep generative models remains a fundamental challenge, particularly for sequential data with regime-switching dynamics. Existing approaches establish identifiability under restrictive assumptions, such as stationarity or limited emission models, and typically rely on variational autoencoder (VAE) estimators, which introduce approximation gaps that limit the recovery of the latent structure. In this work, we address both the theoretical and practical limitations of this setting. First, we establish identifiability of a broad class of recurrent nonlinear switching dynamical systems under flexible assumptions, significantly extending prior results. Second, we introduce $ฮฉ$SDS, a flow-based estimator that enables exact likelihood optimization using expectation-maximisation. Through empirical validation on both synthetic and real-world data, our results demonstrate that $ฮฉ$SDS achieves improved disentanglement compared to VAE-based estimators and more accurate forecasting of underlying dynamics.


Conditional Mutual Information for Disentangled Representations in Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments can produce training data with spurious correlations between features due to the amount of training data or its limited feature coverage. This can lead to RL agents encoding these misleading correlations in their latent representation, preventing the agent from generalising if the correlation changes within the environment or when deployed in the real world. Disentangled representations can improve robustness, but existing disentanglement techniques that minimise mutual information between features require independent features, thus they cannot disentangle correlated features. We propose an auxiliary task for RL algorithms that learns a disentangled representation of high-dimensional observations with correlated features by minimising the conditional mutual information between features in the representation. We demonstrate experimentally, using continuous control tasks, that our approach improves generalisation under correlation shifts, as well as improving the training performance of RL algorithms in the presence of correlated features.