Predictive models trained on observational data often fail to generalise to the distributions they encounter when deployed, especially when the training data is a product of the system being optimised. Recommender systems are a canonical example: they are trained on interaction logs confounded by the deployed policy, past user behaviour, and platform filtering. As a result, the training distribution differs substantially from the candidate distribution scored at serving time, a gap that makes offline metrics unreliable predictors of online performance. We address the distribution shift problem with a method motivated by causal representation learning (CRL). We propose an information-theoretic disentanglement criterion and prove that its optimum depends only on the causal components of the input. We then derive a tractable variational lower bound that makes the criterion optimisable from finite observational data alone. The scope of our method is narrower than that of much of the CRL literature, in that we target better generalisation under distribution shift, not full identification of all latent causal factors. This narrower target is what makes the method practical, requiring only the existing confounded logs, applying to any standard supervised model, and adding no inference-time cost. Our headline evaluation is an A/B test with millions of users on Spotify, applied to a production ranker for personalised playlist generation. A capacity-matched CRL variant performed on par offline but delivered substantial online gains in listener engagement. Complementary evidence on the public KuaiRand recommendation dataset and a synthetic benchmark with known causal structure shows the same pattern: offline parity with baseline, gains under distribution shift. Across all three settings, adding our causal disentanglement objective yields meaningfully better out-of-distribution generalisation.

Active learning for continuous regression has lacked an acquisition function that targets epistemic uncertainty when the predictive distribution is multimodal: variance misses modal disagreement, and information-theoretic targets like BALD are designed for discrete outputs. We introduce a Two-Index framework that makes this separation explicit: one stochastic index selects among competing model hypotheses (epistemic source), while a second governs within-hypothesis randomness (aleatoric source). An entropy decomposition within the framework identifies the mutual information between the output and the epistemic index as a principled acquisition objective, and we prove this quantity vanishes as the model is trained on growing datasets, confirming that it captures exactly the uncertainty data can resolve. Because this mutual information is intractable for continuous outputs, we derive the Mutual Information Lower Bound (MI-LB) acquisition function, a closed-form approximation for Mixture Density Network ensembles. On benchmarks featuring multimodal systems, MI-LB matches or beats every baseline evaluated and is the only method to do so consistently -- geometric and Fisher-based baselines compete only when the input space already encodes the multimodality, and collapse otherwise.

Dynamics of interacting systems in engineering, society, and nature often evolve over latent networks that govern which entities can interact. We study the problem of inferring these networks from event-based observations, which arise naturally in finance, seismology, and neuroscience. While there is substantial algorithmic work addressing this important problem, theoretical results are scarce. In this paper we ask the following fundamental question: what is the minimum time that one must observe the dynamics in order to exactly recover the underlying network, as a function of the number $d$ of interacting entities? For a class of stationary Hawkes processes with sparse, weak interactions, we prove that an observation time of order $\log d$ is sufficient and necessary. For the upper bound we construct a two-stage estimator that uses clipped and binned event data for screening, followed by a least-squares refinement, and apply concentration bounds derived from the Poisson cluster representation. For the lower bound we combine Fano's inequality with Jacod's Girsanov formula for point processes on a suitable subclass of networks.

We study expected generalization bounds for the Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) setup using Wasserstein distance. We introduce a generalized framework in which data is sampled hierarchically, and we model it with a multi-layered tree structure that induces dependencies among the clients' datasets. We derive generalization bounds in terms of Wasserstein distance under the Lipschitz assumption on the loss function, by applying a supersample construction that allows us to measure the sensitivity of the algorithm to the change of a single node in the sampling tree. By leveraging the FL structure, we recover and strictly imply existing state-of-the-art conditional mutual information (CMI) bounds in the case of bounded losses. We also show that our bound can be applied together with Differential Privacy assumptions, to recover generalization bounds based on algorithmic privacy. To assess the tightness of our bounds, we study the Gaussian Location Model (GLM) and show that we recover the actual asymptotic rate of the generalization error.