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Demystifying excessively volatile human learning: A Bayesian persistent prior and a neural approximation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Understanding how humans and animals learn about statistical regularities in stable and volatile environments, and utilize these regularities to make predictions and decisions, is an important problem in neuroscience and psychology. Using a Bayesian modeling framework, specifically the Dynamic Belief Model (DBM), it has previously been shown that humans tend to make the {\it default} assumption that environmental statistics undergo abrupt, unsignaled changes, even when environmental statistics are actually stable. Because exact Bayesian inference in this setting, an example of switching state space models, is computationally intense, a number of approximately Bayesian and heuristic algorithms have been proposed to account for learning/prediction in the brain. Here, we examine a neurally plausible algorithm, a special case of leaky integration dynamics we denote as EXP (for exponential filtering), that is significantly simpler than all previously suggested algorithms except for the delta-learning rule, and which far outperforms the delta rule in approximating Bayesian prediction performance. We derive the theoretical relationship between DBM and EXP, and show that EXP gains computational efficiency by foregoing the representation of inferential uncertainty (as does the delta rule), but that it nevertheless achieves near-Bayesian performance due to its ability to incorporate a persistent prior influence unique to DBM and absent from the other algorithms. Furthermore, we show that EXP is comparable to DBM but better than all other models in reproducing human behavior in a visual search task, suggesting that human learning and prediction also incorporates an element of persistent prior. More broadly, our work demonstrates that when observations are information-poor, detecting changes or modulating the learning rate is both {\it difficult} and (thus) {\it unnecessary} for making Bayes-optimal predictions.



Regular Fourier Features for Nonstationary Gaussian Processes

Jawaid, Arsalan, Karatas, Abdullah, Seewig, Jörg

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Simulating a Gaussian process requires sampling from a high-dimensional Gaussian distribution, which scales cubically with the number of sample locations. Spectral methods address this challenge by exploiting the Fourier representation, treating the spectral density as a probability distribution for Monte Carlo approximation. Although this probabilistic interpretation works for stationary processes, it is overly restrictive for the nonstationary case, where spectral densities are generally not probability measures. We propose regular Fourier features for harmonizable processes that avoid this limitation. Our method discretizes the spectral representation directly, preserving the correlation structure among spectral weights without requiring probability assumptions. Under a finite spectral support assumption, this yields an efficient low-rank approximation that is positive semi-definite by construction. When the spectral density is unknown, the framework extends naturally to kernel learning from data. We demonstrate the method on locally stationary kernels and on harmonizable mixture kernels with complex-valued spectral densities.






Appendices

Neural Information Processing Systems

The supplementary material is organized as follows. We first discuss additional related work and provide experiment details inSection 2andAppendix Brespectively. Adversarial Defenses: Neural networks trained using standard procedures such as SGD are extremely vulnerable [23] to -bound adversarial attacks such as FGSM [23], PGD [42], CW [11], andMomentum [17];Unrestricted attacks [7,19]cansignificantly degrade model performance as well. Defense strategies based on heuristics such as feature squeezing [82], denoising [80], encoding [10], specialized nonlinearities [83] and distillation [56] have had limited success against stronger attacks [2]. Then, we introduce a noisy version of the5-slab block,whichwelateruseinAppendixD.