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Neural Information Processing Systems

Prompt Template: Generating QAPairs for Camera Motion (CM) Task You are a professional question designer focusing on temporal dynamics in videos, including camera movements, motions, activities, and interactions, rather than static content. You will receive detailed annotations about the temporal details of the entire video, with duration markers in parentheses after "camera_motion" and "motion_list". Based on these annotations, design 3 multiple-choice questions around the "Camera Motion" theme to test models' fine-grained video motion understanding, particularly: Understanding camera movement direction and focus changes in the video. Additionally, follow these question design guidelines: 1. If a video's "camera_motion" has only one element, such as "camera_motion": "static", or "camera_motion": "camera shaking (0-22)", skip this video and don't generate any content.


Identifiability of Deep Polynomial Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Polynomial Neural Networks (PNNs) possess a rich algebraic and geometric structure. However, their identifiability--a key property for ensuring interpretability-- remains poorly understood. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of the identifiability of deep PNNs, including architectures with and without bias terms. Our results reveal an intricate interplay between activation degrees and layer widths in achieving identifiability. As special cases, we show that architectures with non-increasing layer widths are generically identifiable under mild conditions, while encoder-decoder networks are identifiable when the decoder widths do not grow too rapidly compared to the activation degrees. Our proofs are constructive and center on a connection between deep PNNs and low-rank tensor decompositions, and Kruskal-type uniqueness theorems. We also settle an open conjecture on the dimension of PNN's neurovarieties, and provide new bounds on the activation degrees required for it to reach the expected dimension.


Generating Creative Chess Puzzles

Neural Information Processing Systems

While Generative AI rapidly advances in various domains, generating truly creative, aesthetic, and counter-intuitive outputs remains a challenge. This paper presents an approach to tackle these difficulties in the domain of chess puzzles. We start by benchmarking Generative AI architectures, and then introduce an RL framework with novel rewards based on chess engine search statistics to overcome some of those shortcomings. The rewards are designed to enhance a puzzle's uniqueness, counter-intuitiveness, diversity, and realism. Our RL approach dramatically increases counter-intuitive puzzle generation by 10x, from 0.22% (supervised) to 2.5%, surpassing existing dataset rates (2.1%) and the best Lichess-trained model (0.4%).


ACounterfactual Semantics for Hybrid Dynamical Systems

Neural Information Processing Systems

Models of hybrid dynamical systems are widely used to answer questions about the causes and effects of dynamic events in time. Unfortunately, existing causal reasoning formalisms lack support for queries involving the dynamically triggered, discontinuous interventions that characterize hybrid dynamical systems. This mismatch can lead to ad-hoc and error-prone causal analysis workflows in practice. To bridge the gap between the needs of hybrid systems users and current causal inference capabilities, we develop a rigorous counterfactual semantics by formalizing interventions as transformations to the constraints of hybrid systems. Unlike interventions in a typical structural causal model, however, interventions in hybrid systems can easily render the model ill-posed. Thus, we identify mild conditions under which our interventions maintain solution existence, uniqueness, and measurability by making explicit connections to established hybrid systems theory. To illustrate the utility of our framework, we formalize a number of canonical causal estimands and explore a case study on the probabilities of causation with applications to fishery management. Our work simultaneously expands the modeling possibilities available to causal inference practitioners and begins to unlock decades of causality research for users of hybrid systems.


Quantifying Modeling Interactions An Information Decomposition Framework

Neural Information Processing Systems

The recent explosion of interest in multimodal applications has resulted in a wide selection of datasets and methods for representing and integrating information from different modalities. Despite these empirical advances, there remain fundamental research questions: How can we quantify the interactions that are necessary to solve a multimodal task? Subsequently, what are the most suitable multimodal models to capture these interactions? To answer these questions, we propose an information-theoretic approach to quantify the degree of redundancy, uniqueness, and synergy relating input modalities with an output task. We term these three measures as the PID statistics of a multimodal distribution (or PID for short), and introduce two new estimators for these PID statistics that scale to high-dimensional distributions. To validate PID estimation, we conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic datasets where the PID is known and on large-scale multimodal benchmarks where PID estimations are compared with human annotations. Finally, we demonstrate their usefulness in (1) quantifying interactions within multimodal datasets, (2) quantifying interactions captured by multimodal models, (3) principled approaches for model selection, and (4) three real-world case studies engaging with domain experts in pathology, mood prediction, and robotic perception where our framework helps to recommend strong multimodal models for each application.


Phase transitions in Doi-Onsager, Noisy Transformer, and other multimodal models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study phase transitions for repulsive-attractive mean-field free energies on the circle. For a $\frac{1}{n+1}$-periodic interaction whose Fourier coefficients satisfy a certain decay condition, we prove that the critical coupling strength $K_c$ coincides with the linear stability threshold $K_\#$ of the uniform distribution and that the phase transition is continuous, in the sense that the uniform distribution is the unique global minimizer at criticality. The proof is based on a sharp coercivity estimate for the free energy obtained from the constrained Lebedev--Milin inequality. We apply this result to three motivating models for which the exact value of the phase transition and its (dis)continuity in terms of the model parameters was not fully known. For the two-dimensional Doi--Onsager model $W(θ)=-|\sin(2πθ)|$, we prove that the phase transition is continuous at $K_c=K_\#=3π/4$. For the noisy transformer model $W_β(θ)=(e^{β\cos(2πθ)}-1)/β$, we identify the sharp threshold $β_*$ such that $K_c(β) = K_\#(β)$ and the phase transition is continuous for $β\leq β_*$, while $K_c(β) β_*$. We also obtain the corresponding sharp dichotomy for the noisy Hegselmann--Krause model $W_{R}(θ) = (R-2π|θ|)_{+}^2$ .


Unfolding with a Wasserstein Loss

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Data unfolding -- the removal of noise or artifacts from measurements -- is a fundamental task across the experimental sciences. Of particular interest in the present work are applications of data unfolding in physics, in which context the dominant approach is RichardsonLucy (RL) deconvolution. The classical RL approach aims to find denoised data that, once passed through the noise model, is as close as possible to the measured data, in terms of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Fundamental to this approach is the hypothesis that the support of the measured data overlaps with the output of the noise model, so that the KL divergence correctly captures their similarity. In practice, this hypothesis is typically enforced by binning the measured data and noise model, introducing numerical error into the unfolding process. As a counterpoint to classical binned methods for unfolding, the present work studies an alternative formulation of the unfolding problem, using a Wasserstein loss instead of the KL divergence to quantify the similarity between the measured data and the output of the noise model. We establish sharp conditions for existence and uniqueness of optimizers; as a consequence we answer open questions of Li, et al. [23], regarding necessary conditions for existence and uniqueness in the case of transport map noise models. Following these theoretical results, we then develop a provably convergent generalized Sinkhorn algorithm to compute approximate optimizers. Our algorithm requires only empirical observations of the noise model and measured data and scales with the size of the data, rather than the ambient dimension.


The Exponentially Weighted Signature

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The signature is a canonical representation of a multidimensional path over an interval. However, it treats all historical information uniformly, offering no intrinsic mechanism for contextualising the relevance of the past. To address this, we introduce the Exponentially Weighted Signature (EWS), generalising the Exponentially Fading Memory (EFM) signature from diagonal to general bounded linear operators. These operators enable cross-channel coupling at the level of temporal weighting together with richer memory dynamics including oscillatory, growth, and regime-dependent behaviour, while preserving the algebraic strengths of the classical signature. We show that the EWS is the unique solution to a linear controlled differential equation on the tensor algebra, and that it generalises both state-space models and the Laplace and Fourier transforms of the path. The group-like structure of the EWS enables efficient computation and makes the framework amenable to gradient-based learning, with the full semigroup action parametrised by and learned through its generator. We use this framework to empirically demonstrate the expressivity gap between the EWS and both the signature and EFM on two SDE-based regression tasks.