The validity of statistical inference depends critically on how data are collected. When data gathered through active data collection (ADC) are reused for a post-hoc inferential task, conventional inference can fail because the sampling is adaptively biased toward regions favored by the collection strategy. This issue is especially pronounced in black-box optimization, where sequential model-based optimization (SMBO) methods such as the tree-structured Parzen estimator (TPE) and Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) preferentially concentrate evaluations in promising regions. We study statistical inference on actively collected data when the inferential target is constructed in a data-dependent manner after data collection. To enable valid inference in this setting, we propose post-ADC inference, a framework that accounts for the biases arising from both the active data collection process and the subsequent data-driven target construction. Our method builds on selective inference and provides valid $p$-values and confidence intervals that correct for both sources of bias. The framework applies to a broad class of ADC processes by imposing only assumptions on the observation noise, without requiring any assumptions on the underlying black-box function or the surrogate model used by the SMBO algorithm. Empirical results also show that post-ADC inference provides valid inference for data collected by GP-UCB and TPE.

The overall network architecture is shown in Figure 1. This work was done when the author was with Rutgers University. The overall network architecture is shown in Figure 1. We also apply the ReLU activation after its first and second layers. Empirical evaluations show that NHE exhibits admissibility and consistency.

The success of modern multimodal representation learning relies on internet-scale datasets. Due to the low quality of a large fraction of raw web data, data curation has become a critical step in the training pipeline. Filtering using a trained model (i.e., teacher-based filtering) has emerged as a successful solution, leveraging a pre-trained model to compute quality scores. To explain the empirical success of teacher-based filtering, we characterize the performance of filtered contrastive learning under the standard bimodal data generation model. Denoting $η\in(0,1]$ as the fraction of data with correctly matched modalities among $n$ paired samples, we utilize a linear contrastive learning setup to show a provable benefit of data filtering: $(i)$ the error without filtering is upper and lower bounded by $\frac{1}{η\sqrt{n}}$, and $(ii)$ the error with teacher-based filtering is upper bounded by $\frac{1}{\sqrt{ηn}}$ in the large $η$ regime, and by $\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}}$ in the small $η$ regime.

Geometric Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers have become state-of-the-art for learning from 3D protein structures. However, their reliance on message passing prevents them from capturing the hierarchical interactions that govern protein function, such as global domains and long-range allosteric regulation. In this work, we argue that the network architecture itself should mirror this biological hierarchy. We introduce Geometric Graph U-Nets, a new class of models that learn multi-scale representations by recursively coarsening and refining the protein graph. We prove that this hierarchical design can theoretically more expressive than standard Geometric GNNs. Empirically, on the task of protein fold classification, Geometric U-Nets substantially outperform invariant and equivariant baselines, demonstrating their ability to learn the global structural patterns that define protein folds. Our work provides a principled foundation for designing geometric deep learning architectures that can learn the multi-scale structure of biomolecules.

W e consider the problem of ultra-low bit rate visual communication for remote vision analysis, human interactions and control in challenging scenarios with very low communication bandwidth, such as deep space exploration, battlefield intelligence, and robot navigation in complex environments. In this paper, we ask the following important question: can we accurately reconstruct the visual scene using only a very small portion of the bit rate in existing coding methods while not sacrificing the accuracy of vision analysis and performance of human interactions? Existing text-to-image generation models offer a new approach for ultra-low bitrate image description. However, they can only achieve a semantic-level approximation of the visual scene, which is far insufficient for the purpose of visual communication and remote vision analysis and human interactions. T o address this important issue, we propose to seamlessly integrate image generation with deep image compression, using joint text and coding latent to guide the rectified flow models for precise generation of the visual scene. The semantic text description and coding latent are both encoded and transmitted to the decoder at a very small bit rate. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve the same image reconstruction quality and vision analysis accuracy as existing methods while using much less bandwidth. The code will be released upon paper acceptance.

We use this metric to evaluate the performance versus resource trade-off relevant to the application of interest, and we propose a strategy that selects the device settings that can optimally meet users' requirements.

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) improves the efficiency of long-horizon reinforcement-learning tasks with sparse rewards by decomposing the task into a hierarchy of subgoals. The main challenge of HRL is efficient discovery of the hierarchical structure among subgoals and utilizing this structure to achieve the final goal. We address this challenge by modeling the subgoal structure as a causal graph and propose a causal discovery algorithm to learn it. Additionally, rather than intervening on the subgoals at random during exploration, we harness the discovered causal model to prioritize subgoal interventions based on their importance in attaining the final goal. These targeted interventions result in a significantly more efficient policy in terms of the training cost. Unlike previous work on causal HRL, which lacked theoretical analysis, we provide a formal analysis of the problem. Specifically, for tree structures and, for a variant of Erdős-Rényi random graphs, our approach results in remarkable improvements. Our experimental results on HRL tasks also illustrate that our proposed framework outperforms existing work in terms of training cost.

Recently, Vision-Language foundation models like CLIP and ALIGN, which are pre-trained on large-scale data have shown remarkable zero-shot generalization to diverse datasets with different classes and even domains. In this work, we take a step further and analyze whether these models can be adapted to target datasets having very different distributions and classes compared to what these models have been trained on, using only a few labeled examples from the target dataset. In such scenarios, finetuning large pretrained models is challenging due to problems of overfitting as well as loss of generalization, and has not been well explored in prior literature. Since, the pre-training data of such models are unavailable, it is difficult to comprehend the performance on various downstream datasets. First, we try to answer the question: Given a target dataset with a few labelled examples, can we estimate whether further fine-tuning can enhance the performance compared to zero-shot evaluation? by analyzing the common vision-language embedding space. Based on the analysis, we propose a novel prompt-tuning method, PromptMargin for adapting such large-scale VLMs directly on the few target samples. PromptMargin effectively tunes the text as well as visual prompts for this task, and has two main modules: 1) Firstly, we use a selective augmentation strategy to complement the few training samples in each task; 2) Additionally, to ensure robust training in the presence of unfamiliar class names, we increase the inter-class margin for improved class discrimination using a novel Multimodal Margin Regularizer. Extensive experiments and analysis across fifteen target benchmark datasets, with varying degrees of distribution shifts from natural images, shows the effectiveness of the proposed framework over the existing state-of-the-art approaches applied to this setting.

Pattern database (PDB) is one of the most popular automated heuristic generation techniques. A PDB maps states in a planning task to abstract states by considering a subset of variables and stores their optimal costs to the abstract goal in a look up table. As the result of the progress made on symbolic search over recent years, symbolic-PDB-based planners achieved impressive results in the International Planning Competition (IPC) 2018. Among them, Complementary 1 (CPC1) tied as the second best planners and the best non-portfolio planners in the cost optimal track, only 2 tasks behind the winner. It uses a combination of different pattern generation algorithms to construct PDBs that are complementary to existing ones. As shown in the post contest experiments, there is room for improvement. In this paper, we would like to present our work on refining the PDB construction mechanism of CPC1. By testing on IPC 2018 benchmarks, the results show that a significant improvement is made on our modified planner over the original version.