论文检索

Reinforcement Learning · Everything Else

Harry Chen, Michal Moshkovitz, Cynthia Rudin, Yiyang Sun, Ron Parr, Lesia Semenova, Zachery Boner

The planning horizon in a Markov Decision Process (MDP) determines how far into the future an agent reasons. In practice, shorter horizons are commonly associated with policies that exhibit simpler or more interpretable decision-making behavior. In this paper, we establish a formal connection between environmental stochasticity and planning horizon in MDPs. We show that for broad classes of transition noise, solving a noisy MDP can be formally related to solving a noise-free MDP with a shorter effective discount factor, leading to identical optimal policies in some cases and near-optimal ones in others. We further characterize settings in which this correspondence breaks down, clarifying when horizon-based interpretations of noise are not valid. These results, which are supported by both theory and experiments, also give some insight into the common practice of using smaller discount factors for reinforcement learning than what can be justified by typical, grounded interpretations of a discount factor, such as inflation or the probability of catastrophic failure.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Ethan Hsu, Harry Chen, Chudi Zhong, Lesia Semenova

Real-world machine learning (ML) pipelines rarely produce a single model; instead, they produce a Rashomon set of many near-optimal ones. We show that this multiplicity reshapes key aspects of trustworthiness. At the individual-model level, sparse interpretable models tend to preserve privacy but are fragile to adversarial attacks. In contrast, the diversity within a large Rashomon set enables reactive robustness: even when an attack compromises one model, others often remain accurate. Rashomon sets are also stable under small distribution shifts. However, this same diversity increases information leakage, as disclosing more near-optimal models provides an attacker with progressively richer views of the training data. Through theoretical analysis and empirical studies, we characterize this robustness–privacy trade-off and highlight the dual role of Rashomon sets as both a resource and a risk for trustworthy ML.

Yunfeng Xiao, Xiaowei Bai, Hao Su, Hao He, Liang Xie, Erwei Yin

We introduce physics-as-representation, a learning paradigm that encodes physical structure and geometric laws into visual representations, enabling models to see the unseen—the underlying 3D geometry and motion dynamics not apparent in raw pixels. We instantiate this paradigm in gaze perception by proposing SG-Gaze, a framework that learns a Structurally and Geometrically Consistent Representation (SGR) through dual-branch adversarial learning. An analytical branch embeds appearance features onto a spherical manifold aligned with gaze geodesics, while a model-guided branch reconstructs the 3D eyeball with weak 2D edge supervision. We further introduce View-Consistent Regularization, which augments SGR learning with synthetic view perturbations and enforces rotation-equivariant consistency across gaze vectors and structural projections, eliminating the need for multi-view calibration or explicit 3D labels. Extensive experiments across 12 challenging cross-domain transfers demonstrate that SG-Gaze achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and strong generalization. Our work highlights that enforcing structural and geometric consistency with equivariant regularization serves as effective inductive biases for interpretable and generalizable representation learning—a step toward machines that perceive the world not only from pixels, but from physics.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Michal Moshkovitz, Suraj Srinivas, Lesia Semenova, Nave Frost, Cyrus Rashtchian, Valentyn Boreiko, Shichang Zhang, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Cynthia Rudin, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan

Despite the proliferation of Explainable AI (XAI) techniques—from feature attributions to sparse autoencoders—explanations rarely influence real-world workflows. In practice, they are often generated and discarded without guiding meaningful action. This gap reflects foundational shortcomings: research has not yet established methodologies for integrating explanations into end-to-end, human-in-the-loop systems. This position paper argues that the machine learning community must pivot from ad-hoc XAI methods toward addressing foundational \& structural challenges, including unclear problem formulations, underspecified evaluation objectives, and the absence of pipelines for explanation-driven feedback. We support this claim through an analysis of recent ICML, NeurIPS, and ICLR papers and a survey of XAI practitioners, revealing recurring issues that limit cumulative progress. We conclude by outlining a practical checklist designed to shift XAI toward a more human-centered, action-oriented paradigm. By emphasizing foundational clarity over the development of ad-hoc methods, we hope to provide a roadmap for integrating explanations into actionable, feedback-driven AI systems.

Reinforcement Learning · Everything Else

Xiaojun Guo, Mingxue Tian, Chenheng Zhang, Xiaohan Wang, Jiajun Chai, Guojun Yin, Wei Lin, Yifei Wang, Yisen Wang

Integrating graph knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs) via passive representation faces critical bottlenecks: limited context windows, unreliable numerical computation, and structural hallucinations. To solve this, we propose **GRASP** (Graph Reasoning via Agentic Solving and Probing), shifting the paradigm from passive ingestion to proactive agentic exploration. By interleaving Neighbor Retrieval for on-demand probing with Code Interpreter as a deterministic solver, GRASP enables LLMs to autonomously navigate and compute over complex topologies. We employ a staged reinforcement learning strategy (GRPO) that transitions from visible tuning to a structure-blind environment, forcing the agent to develop genuine topological awareness. Evaluated on multi-domain graph reasoning benchmarks, our 4B model achieves a 53.06\% average performance boost, surpassing SOTA baselines like DeepSeek-V3.2 and successfully generalizing to unseen tasks, with high potential for tackling sampling on million-node graphs and solving Hard-level LeetCode graph problems.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Lecheng Yan, Ruizhe Li, Guanhua CHEN, Qing Li, Jiahui Geng, Wenxi Li, Longyue Wang, Chenyang Lyu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is highly effective for enhancing LLM reasoning, yet recent evidence shows models like Qwen2.5 achieve significant gains even with spurious rewards. We investigate this phenomenon and identify ``Perplexity Paradox'': spurious RLVR triggers a divergence where answer-token perplexity drops while prompt-side coherence degrades, suggesting model is bypassing reasoning in favor of memorization. Using a suite of mechanistic interpretability tools, including Path Patching and Logit Lens, we identify a previously unknown Anchor–Adapter circuit. This circuit enables model to bypass reasoning and directly retrieve memorized solutions under spurious RLVR. We localize a Functional Anchor in middle layers (L18–20) that triggers retrieval of memorized solutions, followed by Structural Adapters in later layers (L21+) that transform representations to accommodate shortcut signal. Finally, we demonstrate that scaling specific MLP keys within this circuit allows for bidirectional causal steering, i.e., artificially amplifying or suppressing contamination-driven performance. Our results provide a mechanistic roadmap for identifying and mitigating data contamination in RLVR-tuned models.

Applications · Health / Medicine

Alma Andersson, Aya Ismail, Edward De Brouwer, Doron Haviv, Tommaso Biancalani, Kyunghyun Cho, Gabriele Scalia, Aicha BenTaieb, Hector Corrada Bravo

Understanding cellular phenotypes and how they respond to perturbations is critical for disease biology and therapeutic design. Single-cell RNA sequencing enables characterization at cellular resolution, yet the combinatorial space of conditions makes exhaustive experimental mapping infeasible. We introduce single-cell Concept Bottleneck Generative Models (scCBGM), a framework for interpretable and precise counterfactual editing of individual cells. scCBGM adapts concept bottleneck architectures for single-cell data through decoder skip connections and a cross-covariance penalty that promotes disentanglement without dimensional constraints. We extend the framework to flow matching models, enabling concept-guided editing in both encoding-decoding and generation regimes. To enable rigorous evaluation, we develop a synthetic benchmark with ground-truth counterfactuals. Across multiple real datasets, scCBGM demonstrates superior accuracy in zero-shot generalization and cell-level counterfactual prediction compared to state-of-the-art methods, while providing interpretable control over biological concepts.

Applications · Time Series

Huayu Li, ZhengXiao He, Xiwen Chen, Jingjing Wang, Siyuan Tian, Jinghao Wen, Ao Li

Learning meaningful representations from medical time series (MedTS), such as ECG or EEG signals, is a critical challenge. These signals are often high-dimensional, variable-length, and rife with noise. Existing self-supervised approaches, such as Masked Autoencoders (MAEs), are highly effective for pre-training general-purpose encoders. However, they do not explicitly learn compact, fixed-size, or semantically interpretable latent representations, typically relying on heuristic aggregation strategies such as global average pooling or a designated [CLS] token. We propose a novel framework that compresses a variable-length MedTS into a fixed-size set of $k$ latent Fingerprint Tokens. Our architecture employs a cross-attention bottleneck to generate these tokens and is trained with a dual-objective function. The first objective is a reconstruction loss, which ensures the tokens are \textit{sufficient statistics} for the original data. The second, a diversity penalty based on the Total Coding Rate (TCR), explicitly minimizes the redundancy between tokens, encouraging them to become statistically \textit{disentangled} representations. We present the theoretical justification for our method, framing it as a novel \textbf{Disentangled Rate-Distortion} problem. This approach produces a low-dimensional, interpretable, and sample-efficient representation, where each token is encouraged to capture an independent factor of variation, paving the way for more robust digital biomarkers.

Applications · Health / Medicine

Jiaqi Men, Hua Liu, Yiming Tang, Jinhong You, Jianghu Dong, Jiguo Cao

Accurate survival prediction in kidney transplantation is critical yet challenging due to the complex interplay between functional biomarkers and patient characteristics under censoring. To address this, we propose a functional censored quantile neural network (FunCQNet), a novel framework that integrates deep neural networks with a censoring-adjusted sequential quantile loss to approximate interaction-dependent coefficient functions. We further introduce a conformal inference approach to rigorously assess the significance of scalar-functional interactions, ensuring interpretability alongside predictive power. Extensive simulations demonstrate that FunCQNet robustly recovers functional effects under varying noise and censoring levels. When applied to kidney transplant data, the model yields precise multi-quantile predictions and reveals clinically significant, age-dependent interaction patterns between donor type and recipient survival.

Applications · Health / Medicine

Yaxuan Song, Jianan Fan, Tianyi Wang, Qiuyue Hu, Hang Chang, Heng Huang, Weidong Cai

Histopathology whole-slide images (WSIs) are routinely acquired in clinical practice and contain rich tissue morphology but lack direct molecular architecture and functional programs defining pathological states, whereas RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) provides genome-wide transcriptional profiles at substantial cost, thereby motivating WSI-based genome-wide transcriptomic prediction. Existing approaches for predicting gene expression from WSIs predominantly rely on deterministic regression with one-to-one mapping, limiting their ability to capture biological heterogeneity and predictive uncertainty. We propose RNA-FM, a flow-matching generative framework for genome-wide bulk RNA-seq prediction from histopathology images. RNA-FM formulates transcriptomic prediction as a continuous-time conditional transport problem, learning a velocity field that maps a simple prior to the target gene expression distribution conditioned on morphological features. By incorporating pathway-level structure, RNA-FM enables scalable, biologically interpretable, and genome-wide gene expression imputation. Extensive experiments across multiple anatomical regions, pathway-level analysis, and external validation cohorts demonstrate that RNA-FM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches while effectively capturing both inter-patient and intra-tumoral heterogeneity.

Applications · Health / Medicine

Lina Zhang, Jiarui Cui, Tonmoy Monsoor, Peizheng Li, Xinyi Peng, Chong Han, Prateik Sinha, Siyuan Dai, Jessica Pasqua, Colin McCrimmon 等

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in general video understanding, their capacity to interpret involuntary, and spatio-temporally evolving pathologic motor behaviors such as seizure semiology remains largely untested. To address this gap, we introduce Seizure-Semiology-Suite (S³), a clinically grounded dataset and benchmark for fine-grained, structured seizure semiology understanding. The dataset includes 438 seizure videos annotated with over 35,000 dense labels covering 20 ILAE-defined semiological features. Building on this dataset, we propose a seven-task hierarchical benchmark that systematically evaluates MLLMs from low-level visual perception to temporal sequencing, narrative report generation, and seizure diagnosis. To enable clinically meaningful evaluation of generated reports, we further introduce the Report Quality Index for Seizure Semiology (Seizure-RQI). Extensive baselines across 11 open-weight MLLMs reveal systematic weaknesses in laterality reasoning, temporal localization, symptom sequencing, and clinically faithful reporting. We show that seizure-specific fine-tuning substantially improves performance across tasks, and that a two-stage neuro-symbolic framework achieves an F1 score of 0.96 on epileptic versus non-epileptic seizure classification. Seizure-Semiology-Suite establishes a rigorous benchmark for evaluating multimodal models in safety-critical medical video understanding and guides the development of clinically reliable, domain-adaptive multimodal intelligence.

Optimization · Stochastic

Haeun Jeon, Seunghoon Choi, Hyunglip Bae, Yongjae Lee, Woo Chang Kim

Sparse tangent portfolio optimization aims to learn an interpretable, low-cardinality portfolio in the tangency direction of the mean–variance frontier, yet the associated cardinality-constrained formulation is NP-hard and standard predict-then-optimize pipelines often misalign forecasting accuracy with downstream portfolio quality. We propose an end-to-end decision-focused learning framework that reformulates Sharpe-ratio maximization as a Disciplined Parametrized Programming (DPP)-compliant convex programming layer and replaces discrete selection with a smooth top-k operator enforcing an exact sum-to-k sparsity budget. This enables gradient flow through prediction, asset selection, and re-optimization, allowing the predictive model to directly optimize the portfolio performance. Across five major equity markets, our method consistently delivers higher out-of-sample Sharpe ratios than historical and prediction-focused baselines while producing meaningful sparse selections.

Social Aspects · Alignment

Jingyu Zhang, Kun Yang, Ming Wen, jiawei zhao, Yuxuan Liu, Zhuoer Xu, shiwen cui

Aligning Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with human preferences remains a fundamental challenge. While Generative Reward Models (GRMs) offer a promising reasoning-based alternative to scalar models, they are often hindered by severe position bias and prohibitively high computational overhead. To address these limitations, we propose GenAlign, a unified framework that synergizes robust generative reward modeling with efficient MLLM alignment. First, we introduce a rubric-based GRM that explicitly models the preference judgment process. By employing reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards and an online position debiasing mechanism, our model produces interpretable reasoning critiques and robust preference predictions. Second, we propose a policy optimization strategy utilizing advantage-smoothed dynamic reference anchoring. This approach reduces computational complexity while mitigating gradient instability caused by variance collapse. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GenAlign achieves state-of-the-art preference prediction accuracy on multimodal reward modeling benchmarks. Moreover, it consistently improves the performance of three MLLMs across seven diverse evaluation benchmarks, particularly making significant progress in safety and hallucination.

Applications · Health / Medicine

Xiaoda Wang, Ching Chang, Defu Cao, Kaiqiao Han, Fang Sun, Yue Huang, Minxiao Wang, Chang Xu, Xiao Luo, Runze Yan 等

Physiological waveforms (e.g., ECG, PPG, EEG) encode clinically meaningful information in fine-grained morphology, precise timing, and cross-channel dynamics, yet most machine learning systems still treat them as generic time series and optimize end-to-end prediction. In this position paper, **we argue for verifiable physiological waveform reasoning: extracting localized, measurable signal evidence from raw signals, interpreting that evidence into physiological semantics, and supporting clinically grounded decisions.** Waveform reasoning is challenging due to acquisition heterogeneity, signal fidelity, complex semantics and cross-channel coupled dynamics. We analyze why existing model families remain insufficient: physiological foundation models learn strong perceptual representations but remain weak at verifiable reasoning, while LLM-based adaptations have limited waveform understanding. To bridge this gap, **we advocate verifiable, closed-loop systems that unify waveform semantics with language intelligence.** Concretely, we propose a dual-process architecture that System 1 aligns physiological waveforms with language, and System 2 provides agentic reasoning via a Plan--Act--Verify loop, together enabling verifiable physiological waveform reasoning. We further propose evaluations beyond accuracy, emphasizing traceability, replayability, counterfactual robustness, and calibrated abstention.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Ruijie Shi, Houbin Zhang, Yuecheng Han, Yuheng Wang, Jingru Fan, Runde Yang, Yufan Dang, Huatao Li, Dewen Liu, Yuan Cheng 等

Large Language Models have shown strong capabilities in complex problem solving, yet many agentic systems remain difficult to interpret and control due to opaque internal workflows. While some frameworks offer explicit architectures for collaboration, many deployed agentic systems operate as black boxes to users. We address this by introducing Agentic Workflow Reconstruction (AWR), a new task aiming to synthesize an explicit, interpretable stand-in workflow that approximates a black-box system using only input--output access. We propose AgentXRay, a search-based framework that formulates AWR as a combinatorial optimization problem over discrete agent roles and tool invocations in a chain-structured workflow space. Unlike model distillation, AgentXRay produces editable white-box workflows that match target outputs under an observable, output-based proxy metric, without accessing model parameters. To navigate the vast search space, AgentXRay employs Monte Carlo Tree Search enhanced by a scoring-based Red-Black Pruning mechanism, which dynamically integrates proxy quality with search depth. Experiments across diverse domains demonstrate that AgentXRay achieves higher proxy similarity and reduces token consumption compared to unpruned search, enabling deeper workflow exploration under fixed iteration budgets.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Judy Zhu, Dhari Gandhi, Ahmad Mianroodi, Dhanesh Ramachandram, Sedef Akinli Kocak, shaina raza

Agentic AI systems behave through trajectories: they plan, invoke tools, update memory, and coordinate over multiple steps. However, interpretability remains largely model-centric, focused on explaining single predictions rather than tracing long-horizon behavior and responsibility across interacting components. As a result, critical failures, such as tool misuse, coordination breakdowns, or goal drift, often evade existing audits until harm occurs. **We argue that interpretability for agentic systems must become system-centric, addressing trajectories, responsibility assignment, and lifecycle dynamics rather than internal model mechanisms alone.** We advance three claims: interpretability must (1) co-evolve with agentic capabilities, (2) address distinct layers of opacity with tailored methods, and (3) integrate across the deployment lifecycle. To operationalize this position, we introduce **ATLIS (Agentic Trajectory and Layered Interpretability Stack)**, a framework integrating five interpretability layers across a five-stage deployment lifecycle. ATLIS enables lightweight continuous monitoring with risk-aware escalation to deeper system-level analysis when incidents are detected. ATLIS provides a blueprint for closing the growing gap between agentic capabilities and the interpretability infrastructure needed to govern them.

Probabilistic Methods · Graphical Models

Juha Harviainen, Frank Sommer, Manuel Sorge

Polytrees are a subclass of Bayesian networks that seek to capture the conditional dependencies between a set of $n$ variables as a directed forest and are motivated by their more efficient inference and improved interpretability. Since the problem of learning the best polytree is NP-hard, we study which restrictions make it more tractable by considering for example in-degree bounds, properties of score functions measuring the quality of a polytree, and approximation algorithms. We devise an algorithm that finds the optimal polytree in time $\mathcal{O}\big((2+\epsilon)^n\big)$ for arbitrarily small $\epsilon > 0$ and any constant in-degree bound $k$, improving over the fastest previously known algorithm of time complexity $\mathcal{O}\big(3^n\big)$. We further give polynomial-time algorithms for finding a polytree whose score is within a factor of $k$ from the optimal one for arbitrary scores and a factor of $2$ for additive ones. Many of the results are complemented by (nearly) tight lower bounds for either the time complexity or the approximation factors.

Deep Learning · Other Representation Learning

Kry Yik Chau Lui, Cheng Chi, Kishore Basu, Yanshuai Cao

Deep neural networks excel in vision, language, and audio, yet continue to underperform relative to tree-based models on tabular data. We identify and extend inductive biases crucial for tabular learning—robustness to irrelevant features, axis alignment, localized irregularities, feature heterogeneity, and training stability—and propose *LassoFlexNet*, a novel architecture coupled with a new training algorithm. LassoFlexNet employs a Tied Group Lasso mechanism that sparsely selects raw inputs based on nonlinear per-feature embeddings. This design encourages a raw input variable to contribute jointly with others only if it provides marginal predictive value, linearly or nonlinearly. The resulting non-homogeneity and localized irregularities introduce optimization challenges that defeat standard stochastic and proximal-gradient methods. To address this, we develop a *Sequential Hierarchical Proximal Gradient optimizer with exponential moving averages (EMA)*, enabling stable training. Across 52 datasets from three recent benchmarks, LassoFlexNet matches or surpasses state-of-the-art tree-based models, achieving up to 10% relative gains while improving interpretability. We further validate our design through ablation studies and prove enhanced expressivity for a key architectural component.

Applications · Computer Vision

Yulong Yang, Zhikun Xu, Yaojun Li, Christine Allen-Blanchette

When the color distribution of input images changes at inference, the performance of conventional neural network architectures drops considerably. A few researchers have begun to incorporate prior knowledge of color geometry in neural network design. These color equivariant architectures have modeled hue variation with 2D rotations, and saturation and luminance transformations as 1D translations. While this approach improves neural network robustness to color variations in a number of contexts, we find that approximating saturation and luminance (interval valued quantities) as 1D translations introduces appreciable artifacts. In this paper, we introduce a color equivariant architecture that is truly equivariant. Instead of approximating the interval with the real line, we lift values on the interval to values on the circle (a double-cover) and build equivariant representations there. Our approach resolves the approximation artifacts of previous methods, improves interpretability and generalizability, and achieves better predictive performance than conventional and equivariant baselines on tasks such as fine-grained classification and medical imaging tasks. Going beyond the context of color, we show that our proposed lifting can also extend to geometric transformations such as scale.

Applications · Computer Vision

YUANTONG CHEN, Zhengyan Ding, YanFeng Shang

While emerging training-free video anomaly detection (VAD) methods offer advantages such as interpretability and ease of deployment, they often suffer from computational inefficiency due to complex memory retrieval mechanisms or high-latency visual language models (VLMs). To address this, we propose PRISM (Parameter-free Recognition Based on Intrinsic Statistical Modeling), a novel framework for efficient open-set anomaly detection with minimal computational cost. PRISM based on a pre-trained multimodal embedding model, introduces differential amplification and whitening mechanisms to statistically suppress common-mode background noise in the embedding space, thereby significantly improving the signal-to-noise ratio of anomalous events. Extensive experiments on three mainstream datasets demonstrate that PRISM achieves state-of-the-art performance Real-time reasoning ability and interpretability. Furthermore, our statistical model provides a theoretical explanation for the performance gap (particularly mean accuracy (AP)) observed in existing training-free methods on complex datasets such as XD-Violence.