This paper introduces an algorithm-agnostic approach to feature-based time series clustering via amortized neural inference. By training neural networks to approximate the optimal partitioning rule from simulated data, the proposed framework reduces reliance on conventional clustering methods, such as $K$-means, $K$-medoids, or hierarchical clustering, and their associated objective functions and heuristics. Leveraging statistical features, such as autocorrelations and quantile autocorrelations, the approach learns a data-driven affinity structure from which clustering partitions can be recovered, without requiring explicit prior specification of cluster shapes or structures. In addition, one version of the method can automatically determine the number of clusters, avoiding ad-hoc selection procedures. Comprehensive empirical studies show that the proposed framework achieves competitive or superior clustering accuracy relative to traditional methods, even in challenging scenarios where competing techniques are provided with the true number of clusters. An application to financial time series of stock returns illustrates its practical utility. By reducing the need for algorithm selection and calibration, the proposed framework opens new possibilities for automated, adaptive, and data-driven clustering of temporal data across scientific and industrial domains.

Training language models via reinforcement learning often relies on imperfect proxy rewards, since ground truth rewards that precisely define the intended behavior are rarely available. Standard metrics for assessing the quality of proxy rewards, such as ranking accuracy, treat incorrect rewards as strictly harmful. In this work, however, we highlight that not all deviations from the ground truth are equal. By theoretically analyzing which outputs attract probability during policy gradient optimization, we categorize reward errors according to their effect on the increase in ground truth reward. The analysis establishes that reward errors, though conventionally viewed as harmful, can also be benign or even beneficial by preventing the policy from stalling around outputs with mediocre ground truth reward. We then present two practical implications of our theory. First, for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), we develop reward model evaluation metrics that account for the harmfulness of reward errors. Compared to standard ranking accuracy, these metrics typically correlate better with the performance of a language model after RLHF, yet gaps remain in robustly evaluating reward models. Second, we provide insights for reward design in settings with verifiable rewards. A key theme underlying our results is that the effectiveness of a proxy reward function depends heavily on its interaction with the initial policy and learning algorithm.

We study the fundamental mistake bound and sample complexity in the strategic1 classification, where agents can strategically manipulate their feature vector up2 to an extent in order to be predicted as positive. For example, given a classifier3 determining college admission, student candidates may try to take easier classes to4 improve their GPA, retake SAT and change schools in an effort to fool the classifier.5 Ball manipulations are a widely studied class of manipulations in the literature,6 where agents can modify their feature vector within a bounded radius ball. Unlike7 most prior work, our work consider manipulations to be personalized, meaning8 that agents can have different levels of manipulation abilities (e.g., varying radii9 for ball manipulations), and unknown to the learner.10 We formalize the learning problem in an interaction model where the learner11 first deploys a classifier and the agent manipulates the feature vector within their12 manipulation set to game the deployed classifier. We investigate various scenarios13 in terms of the information available to the learner during the interaction, such14 as observing the original feature vector before or after deployment, observing the15 manipulated feature vector, or not seeing either the original or the manipulated16 feature vector. We begin by providing online mistake bounds and PAC sample17 complexity in these scenarios for ball manipulations. We also explore non-ball18 manipulations and show that, even in the simplest scenario where both the original19 and the manipulated feature vectors are revealed, the mistake bounds and sample20 complexity are lower bounded by Ω(|H|) when the target function belongs to a21 known class H.22

In this section, we provide the detailed description of the datasets we used to perform all the experiments for CoMix, namely, (1) UCF-HMDB [3], (2) Jester [13], and (3) Epic-Kitchens [12].

We set the patch size to be 8. Our model is optimized by AdamW optimizer [3] with a learning rate2 of 0.0004, 250k training steps, linearly warm-up of 5000 steps and an exponentially weight-decaying3 schedule. The gradient norm is clipped at 1. We use Pytorch automatic mixed-precision and data4 paralleling for training acceleration. All models are trained on 4 Nvidia RTXA5000 GPUs with a5 total batch size of 128.

Segmentation of curvilinear structures such as vasculature and road networks is challenging due to relatively weak signals and complex geometry/topology.