Estimating how uncertain an AI system is in its predictions is important to improve the safety of such systems. Uncertainty in predictive can result from uncertainty in model parameters, irreducible \emph{data uncertainty} and uncertainty due to distributional mismatch between the test and training data distributions. Different actions might be taken depending on the source of the uncertainty so it is important to be able to distinguish between them. Recently, baseline tasks and metrics have been defined and several practical methods to estimate uncertainty developed. These methods, however, attempt to model uncertainty due to distributional mismatch either implicitly through \emph{model uncertainty} or as \emph{data uncertainty}. This work proposes a new framework for modeling predictive uncertainty called Prior Networks (PNs) which explicitly models \emph{distributional uncertainty}. PNs do this by parameterizing a prior distribution over predictive distributions. This work focuses on uncertainty for classification and evaluates PNs on the tasks of identifying out-of-distribution (OOD) samples and detecting misclassification on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, where they are found to outperform previous methods. Experiments on synthetic and MNIST and CIFAR-10 data show that unlike previous non-Bayesian methods PNs are able to distinguish between data and distributional uncertainty.

Factorization machines and polynomial networks are supervised polynomial models based on an efficient low-rank decomposition.

Estimating how uncertain an AI system is in its predictions is important to improve the safety of such systems. Uncertainty in predictive can result from uncertainty in model parameters, irreducible \emph{data uncertainty} and uncertainty due to distributional mismatch between the test and training data distributions. Different actions might be taken depending on the source of the uncertainty so it is important to be able to distinguish between them. Recently, baseline tasks and metrics have been defined and several practical methods to estimate uncertainty developed. These methods, however, attempt to model uncertainty due to distributional mismatch either implicitly through \emph{model uncertainty} or as \emph{data uncertainty}. This work proposes a new framework for modeling predictive uncertainty called Prior Networks (PNs) which explicitly models \emph{distributional uncertainty}. PNs do this by parameterizing a prior distribution over predictive distributions. This work focuses on uncertainty for classification and evaluates PNs on the tasks of identifying out-of-distribution (OOD) samples and detecting misclassification on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, where they are found to outperform previous methods. Experiments on synthetic and MNIST and CIFAR-10 data show that unlike previous non-Bayesian methods PNs are able to distinguish between data and distributional uncertainty.

Recently, Bjøru et al. proposed a novel divide-and-conquer algorithm for bounding counterfactual probabilities in structural causal models (SCMs). They assumed that the SCMs were learned from purely observational data, leading to an imprecise characterization of the marginal distributions of exogenous variables. Their method leveraged the canonical representation of structural equations to decompose a general SCM with high-cardinality exogenous variables into a set of sub-models with low-cardinality exogenous variables. These sub-models had precise marginals over the exogenous variables and therefore admitted efficient exact inference. The aggregated results were used to bound counterfactual probabilities in the original model. The approach was developed for Markovian models, where each exogenous variable affects only a single endogenous variable. In this paper, we investigate extending the methodology to \textit{semi-Markovian} SCMs, where exogenous variables may influence multiple endogenous variables. Such models are capable of representing confounding relationships that Markovian models cannot. We illustrate the challenges of this extension using a minimal example, which motivates a set of alternative solution strategies. These strategies are evaluated both theoretically and through a computational study.

Public Narratives (PNs) are key tools for leadership development and civic mobilization, yet their systematic analysis remains challenging due to their subjective interpretation and the high cost of expert annotation. In this work, we propose a novel computational framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to automate the qualitative annotation of public narratives. Using a codebook we co-developed with subject-matter experts, we evaluate LLM performance against that of expert annotators. Our work reveals that LLMs can achieve near-human-expert performance, achieving an average F1 score of 0.80 across 8 narratives and 14 codes. We then extend our analysis to empirically explore how PN framework elements manifest across a larger dataset of 22 stories. Lastly, we extrapolate our analysis to a set of political speeches, establishing a novel lens in which to analyze political rhetoric in civic spaces. This study demonstrates the potential of LLM-assisted annotation for scalable narrative analysis and highlights key limitations and directions for future research in computational civic storytelling.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting plays an indispensable role in endowing large language models (LLMs) with complex reasoning capabilities. However, CoT currently faces two fundamental challenges: (1) Sufficiency, which ensures that the generated intermediate inference steps comprehensively cover and substantiate the final conclusion; and (2) Necessity, which identifies the inference steps that are truly indispensable for the soundness of the resulting answer. We propose a causal framework that characterizes CoT reasoning through the dual lenses of sufficiency and necessity. Incorporating causal Probability of Sufficiency and Necessity allows us not only to determine which steps are logically sufficient or necessary to the prediction outcome, but also to quantify their actual influence on the final reasoning outcome under different intervention scenarios, thereby enabling the automated addition of missing steps and the pruning of redundant ones. Extensive experimental results on various mathematical and commonsense reasoning benchmarks confirm substantial improvements in reasoning efficiency and reduced token usage without sacrificing accuracy. Our work provides a promising direction for improving LLM reasoning performance and cost-effectiveness.

First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. Summary: This paper attempts to link sparse optimization methodology to the anatomical structure of locust's early olfactory system. The work is motivated by the observation that odorant molecules are sparsely represented by the population of Kenyon cells. The authors first mathematically formulate the olfactory system as a MAP decoder, and give the standard solution to the problem without considering biological constraints. Next, to make the solution more biologically plausible, the authors reformulate the olfactory system model as a decoder of a compressive sensing problem, and provide two standard solutions to the dual problem. Then, the authors argue that each of the components in the solution can be mapped/interpreted to/as a unit of the biological structure in the olfactory system. However, these maps are described without a strong justification and there are conceptual problems in linking the math with the biology.

This point should be corrected in the introduction).