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08309150af77fc7c79ade0bf8bb6a562-Supplemental-Conference.pdf
This Appendix is divided into three sections. First, Section A empirically validates the feasibility of Assumption 1. Next, in Section B, complete proofs of all the lemmas and theorems are presented. Finally, in Section C, we provide detailed settings of baselines and additional experimental results, including the hyper-parameter analysis and the percentage of rectified data. The users' true preference distribution ฮท fulfills the relaxed Multiclass Tsybakov Condition [1] with constants C > 0, ฮป > 0, and ฮฑ0 (0,1], such that for all ฮฑ (0,ฮฑ0], The feasibility of Assumption 1 relies on large C and small ฮป. In order to estimate the values of C and ฮป, the initial step is to approximate the true preference distribution ฮท.
Theoretically Guaranteed Bidirectional Data Rectification for Robust Sequential Recommendation
Sequential recommender systems (SRSs) are typically trained to predict the next item as the target given its preceding (and succeeding) items as the input. Such a paradigm assumes that every input-target pair is reliable for training. However, users can be induced to click on items that are inconsistent with their true preferences, resulting in unreliable instances, i.e., mismatched input-target pairs. Current studies on mitigating this issue suffer from two limitations: (i) they discriminate instance reliability according to models trained with unreliable data, yet without theoretical guarantees that such a seemingly contradictory solution can be effective; and (ii) most methods can only tackle either unreliable input or targets but fail to handle both simultaneously. To fill the gap, we theoretically unveil the relationship between SRS predictions and instance reliability, whereby two error-bounded strategies are proposed to rectify unreliable targets and input, respectively. On this basis, we devise a model-agnostic Bidirectional Data Rectification (BirDRec) framework, which can be flexibly implemented with most existing SRSs for robust training against unreliable data. Additionally, a rectification sampling strategy is devised and a self-ensemble mechanism is adopted to reduce the (time and space) complexity of BirDRec. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets verify the generality, effectiveness, and efficiency of our proposed BirDRec.
Rare Event Analysis via Stochastic Optimal Control
Du, Yuanqi, He, Jiajun, Zhang, Dinghuai, Vanden-Eijnden, Eric, Domingo-Enrich, Carles
Rare events such as conformational changes in biomolecules, phase transitions, and chemical reactions are central to the behavior of many physical systems, yet they are extremely difficult to study computationally because unbiased simulations seldom produce them. Transition Path Theory (TPT) provides a rigorous statistical framework for analyzing such events: it characterizes the ensemble of reactive trajectories between two designated metastable states (reactant and product), and its central object--the committor function, which gives the probability that the system will next reach the product rather than the reactant--encodes all essential kinetic and thermodynamic information. We introduce a framework that casts committor estimation as a stochastic optimal control (SOC) problem. In this formulation the committor defines a feedback control--proportional to the gradient of its logarithm--that actively steers trajectories toward the reactive region, thereby enabling efficient sampling of reactive paths. To solve the resulting hitting-time control problem we develop two complementary objectives: a direct backpropagation loss and a principled off-policy Value Matching loss, for which we establish first-order optimality guarantees. We further address metastability, which can trap controlled trajectories in intermediate basins, by introducing an alternative sampling process that preserves the reactive current while lowering effective energy barriers. On benchmark systems, the framework yields markedly more accurate committor estimates, reaction rates, and equilibrium constants than existing methods.