This paper presents a formal framework and proposes algorithms to extend forecast reconciliation to discrete-valued data to extend forecast reconciliation to discrete-valued data, including low counts. A novel method is introduced based on recasting the optimisation of scoring rules as an assignment problem, which is solved using quadratic programming. The proposed framework produces coherent joint probabilistic forecasts for count hierarchical time series. Two discrete reconciliation algorithms are also proposed and compared against generalisations of the top-down and bottom-up approaches for count data. Two simulation experiments and two empirical examples are conducted to validate that the proposed reconciliation algorithms improve forecast accuracy. The empirical applications are forecasting criminal offences in Washington D.C. and product unit sales in the M5 dataset. Compared to benchmarks, the proposed framework shows superior performance in both simulations and empirical studies.
Plug-and-play algorithms constitute a popular framework for solving inverse imaging problems that rely on the implicit definition of an image prior via a denoiser. These algorithms can leverage powerful pre-trained denoisers to solve a wide range of imaging tasks, circumventing the necessity to train models on a per-task basis. Unfortunately, plug-and-play methods often show unstable behaviors, hampering their promise of versatility and leading to suboptimal quality of reconstructed images. In this work, we show that enforcing equivariance to certain groups of transformations (rotations, reflections, and/or translations) on the denoiser strongly improves the stability of the algorithm as well as its reconstruction quality. We provide a theoretical analysis that illustrates the role of equivariance on better performance and stability. We present a simple algorithm that enforces equivariance on any existing denoiser by simply applying a random transformation to the input of the denoiser and the inverse transformation to the output at each iteration of the algorithm. Experiments on multiple imaging modalities and denoising networks show that the equivariant plug-and-play algorithm improves both the reconstruction performance and the stability compared to their non-equivariant counterparts.
Recently, a series of papers proposed deep learning-based approaches to sample from target distributions using controlled diffusion processes, being trained only on the unnormalized target densities without access to samples. Building on previous work, we identify these approaches as special cases of a generalized Schr\"odinger bridge problem, seeking a stochastic evolution between a given prior distribution and the specified target. We further generalize this framework by introducing a variational formulation based on divergences between path space measures of time-reversed diffusion processes. This abstract perspective leads to practical losses that can be optimized by gradient-based algorithms and includes previous objectives as special cases. At the same time, it allows us to consider divergences other than the reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence that is known to suffer from mode collapse. In particular, we propose the so-called log-variance loss, which exhibits favorable numerical properties and leads to significantly improved performance across all considered approaches.
We propose a new framework for algorithmic stability in the context of multiclass classification. In practice, classification algorithms often operate by first assigning a continuous score (for instance, an estimated probability) to each possible label, then taking the maximizer -- i.e., selecting the class that has the highest score. A drawback of this type of approach is that it is inherently unstable, meaning that it is very sensitive to slight perturbations of the training data, since taking the maximizer is discontinuous. Motivated by this challenge, we propose a pipeline for constructing stable classifiers from data, using bagging (i.e., resampling and averaging) to produce stable continuous scores, and then using a stable relaxation of argmax, which we call the "inflated argmax," to convert these scores to a set of candidate labels. The resulting stability guarantee places no distributional assumptions on the data, does not depend on the number of classes or dimensionality of the covariates, and holds for any base classifier. Using a common benchmark data set, we demonstrate that the inflated argmax provides necessary protection against unstable classifiers, without loss of accuracy.
In this paper, we develop a new and effective approach to nonparametric quantile regression that accommodates ultrahigh-dimensional data arising from spatio-temporal processes. This approach proves advantageous in staving off computational challenges that constitute known hindrances to existing nonparametric quantile regression methods when the number of predictors is much larger than the available sample size. We investigate conditions under which estimation is feasible and of good overall quality and obtain sharp approximations that we employ to devising statistical inference methodology. These include simultaneous confidence intervals and tests of hypotheses, whose asymptotics is borne by a non-trivial functional central limit theorem tailored to martingale differences. Additionally, we provide finite-sample results through various simulations which, accompanied by an illustrative application to real-worldesque data (on electricity demand), offer guarantees on the performance of the proposed methodology.
We introduce a novel framework for incorporating human expertise into algorithmic predictions. Our approach focuses on the use of human judgment to distinguish inputs which `look the same' to any feasible predictive algorithm. We argue that this framing clarifies the problem of human/AI collaboration in prediction tasks, as experts often have access to information -- particularly subjective information -- which is not encoded in the algorithm's training data. We use this insight to develop a set of principled algorithms for selectively incorporating human feedback only when it improves the performance of any feasible predictor. We find empirically that although algorithms often outperform their human counterparts on average, human judgment can significantly improve algorithmic predictions on specific instances (which can be identified ex-ante). In an X-ray classification task, we find that this subset constitutes nearly 30% of the patient population. Our approach provides a natural way of uncovering this heterogeneity and thus enabling effective human-AI collaboration.
Analogical reasoning is the ability to detect parallels between two seemingly distant objects or situations, a fundamental human capacity used for example in commonsense reasoning, learning, and creativity which is believed by many researchers to be at the core of human and artificial general intelligence. Analogical proportions are expressions of the form ``$a$ is to $b$ what $c$ is to $d$'' at the core of analogical reasoning. The author has recently introduced an abstract algebraic framework of analogical proportions within the general setting of universal algebra. It is the purpose of this paper to further develop the mathematical theory of analogical proportions within that framework as motivated by the fact that it has already been successfully applied to logic program synthesis in artificial intelligence.
Mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices nowadays generate a large amount of heterogeneous spatial-temporal data. It remains a challenging problem to model the spatial-temporal dynamics under privacy concern. Federated learning (FL) has been proposed as a framework to enable model training across distributed devices without sharing original data which reduce privacy concern. Personalized federated learning (PFL) methods further address data heterogenous problem. However, these methods don't consider natural spatial relations among nodes. For the sake of modeling spatial relations, Graph Neural Netowork (GNN) based FL approach have been proposed. But dynamic spatial-temporal relations among edge nodes are not taken into account. Several approaches model spatial-temporal dynamics in a centralized environment, while less effort has been made under federated setting. To overcome these challeges, we propose a novel Federated Adaptive Spatial-Temporal Attention (FedASTA) framework to model the dynamic spatial-temporal relations. On the client node, FedASTA extracts temporal relations and trend patterns from the decomposed terms of original time series. Then, on the server node, FedASTA utilize trend patterns from clients to construct adaptive temporal-spatial aware graph which captures dynamic correlation between clients. Besides, we design a masked spatial attention module with both static graph and constructed adaptive graph to model spatial dependencies among clients. Extensive experiments on five real-world public traffic flow datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-art performance in federated scenario. In addition, the experiments made in centralized setting show the effectiveness of our novel adaptive graph construction approach compared with other popular dynamic spatial-temporal aware methods.
Quantum computing has recently emerged as a transformative technology. Yet, its promised advantages rely on efficiently translating quantum operations into viable physical realizations. In this work, we use generative machine learning models, specifically denoising diffusion models (DMs), to facilitate this transformation. Leveraging text-conditioning, we steer the model to produce desired quantum operations within gate-based quantum circuits. Notably, DMs allow to sidestep during training the exponential overhead inherent in the classical simulation of quantum dynamics -- a consistent bottleneck in preceding ML techniques. We demonstrate the model's capabilities across two tasks: entanglement generation and unitary compilation. The model excels at generating new circuits and supports typical DM extensions such as masking and editing to, for instance, align the circuit generation to the constraints of the targeted quantum device. Given their flexibility and generalization abilities, we envision DMs as pivotal in quantum circuit synthesis, enhancing both practical applications but also insights into theoretical quantum computation.
The paper establishes frequency predictability criteria and presents predictors for two-sided non-vanishing bounded continuous time signals, i.e., for signals from $L_{\infty}(\R)$ that do not necessarily vanish at $\pm\infty$. The notions of transfer functions, the spectrum gaps, bandlimitness, and high-pass filters are introduced for these signals. This allowed to obtain some frequency criteria for predictability and predictors for signals with spectrum degeneracy.
This paper introduces an efficient and robust method for discovering interpretable circuits in large language models using discrete sparse autoencoders. Our approach addresses key limitations of existing techniques, namely computational complexity and sensitivity to hyperparameters. We propose training sparse autoencoders on carefully designed positive and negative examples, where the model can only correctly predict the next token for the positive examples. We hypothesise that learned representations of attention head outputs will signal when a head is engaged in specific computations. By discretising the learned representations into integer codes and measuring the overlap between codes unique to positive examples for each head, we enable direct identification of attention heads involved in circuits without the need for expensive ablations or architectural modifications. On three well-studied tasks - indirect object identification, greater-than comparisons, and docstring completion - the proposed method achieves higher precision and recall in recovering ground-truth circuits compared to state-of-the-art baselines, while reducing runtime from hours to seconds. Notably, we require only 5-10 text examples for each task to learn robust representations. Our findings highlight the promise of discrete sparse autoencoders for scalable and efficient mechanistic interpretability, offering a new direction for analysing the inner workings of large language models.