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eae27d77ca20db309e056e3d2dcd7d69-Paper.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Furthermore, we show that the WAE objective is related to other statistical quantities such as thef-divergence and in particular, upper bounded by the Wasserstein distance, which then allows us to tap into existing efficient(regularized)optimaltransportsolvers.






Rate doubly robust estimation for weighted average treatment effects

Wang, Yiming, Liu, Yi, Yang, Shu

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The weighted average treatment effect (WATE) defines a versatile class of causal estimands for populations characterized by propensity score weights, including the average treatment effect (ATE), treatment effect on the treated (ATT), on controls (ATC), and for the overlap population (ATO). WATE has broad applicability in social and medical research, as many datasets from these fields align with its framework. However, the literature lacks a systematic investigation into the robustness and efficiency conditions for WATE estimation. Although doubly robust (DR) estimators are well-studied for ATE, their applicability to other WATEs remains uncertain. This paper investigates whether widely used WATEs admit DR or rate doubly robust (RDR) estimators and assesses the role of nuisance function accuracy, particularly with machine learning. Using semiparametric efficient influence function (EIF) theory and double/debiased machine learning (DML), we propose three RDR estimators under specific rate and regularity conditions and evaluate their performance via Monte Carlo simulations. Applications to NHANES data on smoking and blood lead levels, and SIPP data on 401(k) eligibility, demonstrate the methods' practical relevance in medical and social sciences.


A Computable Measure of Suboptimality for Entropy-Regularised Variational Objectives

Chazal, Clémentine, Kanagawa, Heishiro, Shen, Zheyang, Korba, Anna, Oates, Chris. J.

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Several emerging post-Bayesian methods target a probability distribution for which an entropy-regularised variational objective is minimised. This increased flexibility introduces a computational challenge, as one loses access to an explicit unnormalised density for the target. To mitigate this difficulty, we introduce a novel measure of suboptimality called 'gradient discrepancy', and in particular a 'kernel gradient discrepancy' (KGD) that can be explicitly computed. In the standard Bayesian context, KGD coincides with the kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD), and we obtain a novel charasterisation of KSD as measuring the size of a variational gradient. Outside this familiar setting, KGD enables novel sampling algorithms to be developed and compared, even when unnormalised densities cannot be obtained. To illustrate this point several novel algorithms are proposed, including a natural generalisation of Stein variational gradient descent, with applications to mean-field neural networks and prediction-centric uncertainty quantification presented. On the theoretical side, our principal contribution is to establish sufficient conditions for desirable properties of KGD, such as continuity and convergence control.


Reviewer # 1

Neural Information Processing Systems

Thank you for your encouraging comments. Thank you for your thorough and helpful review. We appreciate all of your feedback. This is explained in the "sensor selection" paragraph at the end of the paper and We are glad that you understand and appreciate the significance of Theorem 2. Empirical results/better demonstrations It also suggests that with the "right" constraints put in place, a nonlinear method should do very well. For example, we can try multiple process models on the flu data.


Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards: GRPO's Effective Loss, Dynamics, and Success Amplification

Mroueh, Youssef

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) was introduced and used successfully to train DeepSeek R1 models for promoting reasoning capabilities of LLMs using verifiable or binary rewards. We show in this paper that GRPO with verifiable rewards can be written as a Kullback Leibler ($\mathsf{KL}$) regularized contrastive loss, where the contrastive samples are synthetic data sampled from the old policy. The optimal GRPO policy $\pi_{n}$ can be expressed explicitly in terms of the binary reward, as well as the first and second order statistics of the old policy ($\pi_{n-1}$) and the reference policy $\pi_0$. Iterating this scheme, we obtain a sequence of policies $\pi_{n}$ for which we can quantify the probability of success $p_n$. We show that the probability of success of the policy satisfies a recurrence that converges to a fixed point of a function that depends on the initial probability of success $p_0$ and the regularization parameter $\beta$ of the $\mathsf{KL}$ regularizer. We show that the fixed point $p^*$ is guaranteed to be larger than $p_0$, thereby demonstrating that GRPO effectively amplifies the probability of success of the policy.


Towards Conversational AI for Disease Management

Palepu, Anil, Liévin, Valentin, Weng, Wei-Hung, Saab, Khaled, Stutz, David, Cheng, Yong, Kulkarni, Kavita, Mahdavi, S. Sara, Barral, Joëlle, Webster, Dale R., Chou, Katherine, Hassidim, Avinatan, Matias, Yossi, Manyika, James, Tanno, Ryutaro, Natarajan, Vivek, Rodman, Adam, Tu, Tao, Karthikesalingam, Alan, Schaekermann, Mike

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in diagnostic dialogue, their capabilities for effective management reasoning - including disease progression, therapeutic response, and safe medication prescription - remain under-explored. We advance the previously demonstrated diagnostic capabilities of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) through a new LLM-based agentic system optimised for clinical management and dialogue, incorporating reasoning over the evolution of disease and multiple patient visit encounters, response to therapy, and professional competence in medication prescription. To ground its reasoning in authoritative clinical knowledge, AMIE leverages Gemini's long-context capabilities, combining in-context retrieval with structured reasoning to align its output with relevant and up-to-date clinical practice guidelines and drug formularies. In a randomized, blinded virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) study, AMIE was compared to 21 primary care physicians (PCPs) across 100 multi-visit case scenarios designed to reflect UK NICE Guidance and BMJ Best Practice guidelines. AMIE was non-inferior to PCPs in management reasoning as assessed by specialist physicians and scored better in both preciseness of treatments and investigations, and in its alignment with and grounding of management plans in clinical guidelines. To benchmark medication reasoning, we developed RxQA, a multiple-choice question benchmark derived from two national drug formularies (US, UK) and validated by board-certified pharmacists. While AMIE and PCPs both benefited from the ability to access external drug information, AMIE outperformed PCPs on higher difficulty questions. While further research would be needed before real-world translation, AMIE's strong performance across evaluations marks a significant step towards conversational AI as a tool in disease management.