Estimating causal effects on networks is important for both scientific research and practical applications. Unlike traditional settings that assume the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA), interference allows an intervention/treatment on one unit to affect the outcomes of others. Understanding both direct and spillover effects is critical in fields such as epidemiology, political science, and economics. Causal inference on networks faces two main challenges. First, causal effects are typically heterogeneous, varying with unit features and local network structure. Second, connected units often exhibit dependence due to network homophily, creating confounding between structural correlations and causal effects. In this paper, we propose a two-stage method to estimate heterogeneous direct and spillover effects on networks. The first stage uses graph neural networks to estimate nuisance components that depend on the complex network topology. In the second stage, we adjust for network confounding using these estimates and infer causal effects through a novel attention-based interference model. Our approach balances expressiveness and interpretability, enabling downstream tasks such as identifying influential neighborhoods and recovering the sign of spillover effects. We integrate the two stages using Neyman orthogonalization and cross-fitting, which ensures that errors from nuisance estimation contribute only at higher order. As a result, our causal effect estimates are robust to bias and misspecification in modeling causal effects under network dependencies.

Recently, new types of interference in electric vehicles (EVs), such as converters switching and/or battery chargers, have been found to degrade the performance of wireless digital transmission systems. Measurements show that such an interference is characterized by impulsive behavior and is widely varying in time. This paper uses recorded data from our EV testbed to analyze the impulsive interference in the digital audio broadcasting band. Moreover, we use our analysis to obtain a corresponding interference model. In particular, we studied the temporal characteristics of the interference and confirmed that its amplitude indeed exhibits an impulsive behavior. Our results show that impulsive events span successive received signal samples and thus indicate a bursty nature. To this end, we performed a data-driven modification of a well-established model for bursty impulsive interference, the Markov-Middleton model, to produce synthetic noise realization. We investigate the optimal symbol detector design based on the proposed model and show significant performance gains compared to the conventional detector based on the additive white Gaussian noise assumption.

There is no doubt that the Moon has become the center of interest for commercial and international actors. Over the past decade, the number of planned long-term missions has increased dramatically. This makes the establishment of cislunar space networks (CSNs) crucial to orchestrate uninterrupted communications between the Moon and Earth. However, there are numerous challenges, unknowns, and uncertainties associated with cislunar communications that may pose various risks to lunar missions. In this study, we aim to address these challenges for cislunar communications by proposing a machine learning-based cislunar space domain awareness (SDA) capability that enables robust and secure communications. To this end, we first propose a detailed channel model for selected cislunar scenarios. Secondly, we propose two types of interference that could model anomalies that occur in cislunar space and are so far known only to a limited extent. Finally, we discuss our cislunar SDA to work in conjunction with the spacecraft communication system. Our proposed cislunar SDA, involving heuristic learning capabilities with machine learning algorithms, detects interference models with over 96% accuracy. The results demonstrate the promising performance of our cislunar SDA approach for secure and robust cislunar communication.

Recognizing and telling similar objects apart is even hard for human beings. In this paper, we show that there is a phenomenon of class interference with all deep neural networks. Class interference represents the learning difficulty in data and it constitutes the largest percentage of generalization errors by deep networks. To understand class interference, we propose cross-class tests, class ego directions and interference models. We show how to use these definitions to study minima flatness and class interference of a trained model. We also show how to detect class interference during training through label dancing pattern and class dancing notes. Deep neural networks are very successful for classification (LeCun et al., 2015; Goodfellow et al., 2016) and sequential decision making (Mnih et al., 2015; Silver et al., 2016). However, there lacks a good understanding of why they work well and where is the bottleneck. For example, it is well known that larger learning rates and smaller batch sizes can train models that generalize better.