Causal discovery in time series is increasingly performed using nonlinear machine-learning models, yet the resulting causal relationships are almost always summarized by scalar edge scores. We argue that this practice obscures the true object learned by nonlinear autoregressive models: a state-dependent function whose effect varies across regimes, magnitudes, and contexts. We formalize function-valued causal influence for additive, contribution-decomposable architectures and show that scalar causal scores constitute a severe information bottleneck, conflating between-state variation with within-state residual noise. Using Neural Additive Vector Autoregression as a representative architecture, we introduce a practical framework based on Individual Conditional Expectation for estimating causal response functions directly from trained models. Through controlled synthetic experiments, we demonstrate that edges with indistinguishable scalar scores can exhibit qualitatively different functional behaviors, including monotonic, thresholded, saturating, and sign-changing effects. An applied case study on democratic development further shows that function-valued analysis reveals regime-specific and asymmetric causal structure systematically missed by score-centric approaches.

We study the evolution of hidden-weight spectra in wide neural networks trained by (stochastic) gradient descent. We develop a two-level dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) that jointly tracks bulk and outlier spectral dynamics for spiked ensembles whose spike directions remain statistically dependent on the random bulk. We apply this framework to two settings: (1) infinite-width nonlinear networks in mean-field/$μ$P scaling and (2) deep linear networks in the proportional high-dimensional limit, where width, input dimension, and sample size diverge with fixed ratios. Our theory predicts how outliers evolve with training time, width, output scale, and initialization variance. In deep linear networks, $μ$P yields width-consistent outlier dynamics and hyperparameter transfer, including width-stable growth of the leading NTK mode toward the edge of stability (EoS). In contrast, NTK parameterization exhibits strongly width-dependent outlier dynamics, despite converging to a stable large-width limit. We show that this bulk+outlier picture is descriptive of simple tasks with small output channels, but that tasks involving large numbers of outputs (ImageNet classification or GPT language modeling) are better described by a restructuring of the spectral bulk. We develop a toy model with extensive output channels that recapitulates this phenomenon and show that edge of the spectrum still converges for sufficiently wide networks.

AI generated predictions increasingly inform decision making in critical tasks, and therefore must be trustworthy. One widely used measure of trustworthiness is calibration, which requires that the predictions match the true frequencies and can be treated like real probabilities of a given outcome. However, defining calibration is subtle, and designing good measures of calibration error has been an active topic of recent research. The first goal is to find calibration measures that are actionable, meaning they can inform decision makers about their utility loss when predictions are treated as true probabilities, which is known as swap regret. The second goal is to find calibration measures that are testable, meaning that calibration error can be measured from a small sample of predictions and outcomes. Although these are very basic requirements, there is no existing calibration measure that fully satisfies both properties, and all existing measures relax actionability by bounding a weaker notion of swap regret, or relax testability by having suboptimal estimation error. We introduce a new calibration measure, Soft-Binned Calibration Decision Loss (SCDL), which we prove is fully actionable without weakening either requirement, and testable with nearly optimal error rate. In addition, SCDL satisfies other desired properties such as continuity and consistency. We also provide a set of experiments confirming that the theoretical advantages of SCDL compared to other measures lead to better performance in practice.

We present a machine learning framework for testing general relativity (GR) with gravitational wave signals from binary black hole mergers. Using the source parameters of 173 BBH events from the GWTC catalog as a realistic astrophysical population, we generate simulated GR waveforms and construct beyond GR (BGR) waveforms by applying controlled phase deformations. We introduce a response function formalism that provides a systematic framework for quantifying how any observable responds to modifications of GR. We train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on two input representations: whitened waveforms and a response function type observable derived from the waveform mismatch, which isolates the effect of phase deviations from the bulk signal. Using response functions as the CNN input improves the classification sensitivity by a factor of approximately 33 compared to whitened waveforms, demonstrating that the choice of observable representation is as important as the classifier architecture. We study the fundamental limits of this classification through Bayes optimal error analysis, averaging methods that reveal coherent patterns hidden in noise, and a comparison between CNN accuracy and a single feature classifier as a proxy for human performance. At all deformation scales, the CNN outperforms the best single feature approach. We extend the framework to physically motivated theories using the parameterized post Einsteinian (ppE) formalism and apply it to massive gravity, where the classifier detects deviations for graviton masses of order $m_g \sim 10^{-23}\;\mathrm{eV}/c^2$ with aLIGO design sensitivity.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Neural codes are inevitably shaped by various kinds of biological constraints, \emph{e.g.} noise and metabolic cost. Here we formulate a coding framework which explicitly deals with noise and the metabolic costs associated with the neural representation of information, and analytically derive the optimal neural code for monotonic response functions and arbitrary stimulus distributions. For a single neuron, the theory predicts a family of optimal response functions depending on the metabolic budget and noise characteristics. Interestingly, the well-known histogram equalization solution can be viewed as a special case when metabolic resources are unlimited. For a pair of neurons, our theory suggests that under more severe metabolic constraints, ON-OFF coding is an increasingly more efficient coding scheme compared to ON-ON or OFF-OFF. The advantage could be as large as one-fold, substantially larger than the previous estimation. Some of these predictions could be generalized to the case of large neural populations. In particular, these analytical results may provide a theoretical basis for the predominant segregation into ONand OFF-cells in early visual processing areas. Overall, we provide a unified framework for optimal neural codes with monotonic tuning curves in the brain, and makes predictions that can be directly tested with physiology experiments.

The proposed implementation of Gunsilius' algorithm computes For example, in the expenditure dataset (see Section I.3), In Figure 4, we show the results of Gunsilius's algorithm for three different Note that this algorithm works on the empirical CDFs of all variables, i.e., they are all scaled to lie Figure 4: We show results of Gunsilius's algorithm for 3 different settings of The practical issue of course is the optimization. That alone is already very computationally demanding and has convergence problems. A practical resource, sample size, limits the representational size of the estimator. How to achieve "enough variability" without aiming at a completely flexible distribution of In any case, the finite mixture of Gaussians approach can still be implemented with the reparameter-ization trick. The relation to Gunsilius algorithm is that our "base measure" is smoothly adaptive, leading to possibly more stable behavior in practice.