We study prediction-powered conditional inference in the setting where labeled data are scarce, unlabeled covariates are abundant, and a black-box machine-learning predictor is available. The goal is to perform statistical inference on conditional functionals evaluated at a fixed target point, such as conditional means, without imposing a parametric model for the conditional relationship. Our approach combines localization with prediction-based variance reduction. First, we introduce an RKHS localization method that learns a data-adaptive weight from covariates and reformulates the target conditional moment at the target point as a weighted unconditional moment. Second, we incorporate machine-learning predictions through a correction-based decomposition of this localized moment, yielding a prediction-powered estimator and confidence interval that reduce variance when the predictor is informative while preserving validity regardless of predictor accuracy. We establish nonasymptotic error bounds and, in the abundant-unlabeled regime, minimax-optimal convergence rates for the resulting estimator, prove pointwise asymptotic normality with consistent variance estimation, and provide an explicit variance decomposition that characterizes how machine-learning predictions and unlabeled covariates improve statistical efficiency. Numerical experiments on simulated and real datasets demonstrate valid conditional coverage and substantially sharper confidence intervals than alternative methods.
This work proposes DesignAsCode, a novel framework that reimagines graphic design as a programmatic synthesis task using HTML/CSS, incorporating a Plan-Implement-Reflect pipeline, incorporating a Semantic Planner to construct dynamic, variable-depth element hierarchies and a Visual-Aware Reflection mechanism that optimizes the code to rectify rendering artifacts.
Across business and social science applications, outcomes are often missing in ways that depend on the unobserved outcomes themselves. In service systems, for example, whether a customer submits a rating depends on the rating they would have provided. Such missing-not-at-random (MNAR) mechanisms make population quantities difficult to identify without strong assumptions on the observation process. Meanwhile, rich unstructured data, such as customer interaction histories, are increasingly available and can be used to construct structured measurements using tools such as large language models (LLMs). In this work, we develop an assumption-lean partial identification framework that uses such measurements as weak shadow variables, defined as outcome-informative proxies that are conditionally independent of missingness given the true outcome and observed covariates. Importantly, they need not accurately predict missing outcomes or satisfy the completeness requirement in the classical shadow variable literature. For identification, we characterize sharp bounds on population quantities through a pair of linear programs. For estimation and inference, we propose a localized penalized estimator that remains feasible under sampling error, and a subsampling algorithm for constructing confidence intervals. In semi-synthetic experiments using real customer-service dialogues, weak-shadow-variable intervals are about 89\% narrower than those without auxiliary information, while their midpoints have around 41\% lower estimation error than classical MNAR methods.
Hongyu Chen, David Simchi-Levi, Ruoxuan Xiong· 0 citations
This work introduces a hybrid quantum graph learning architecture designed explicitly for unsupervised learning in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) regime that combines a variational quantum feature extraction layer with an edge-local and qubit-efficient quantum message-passing mechanism inspired by the Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz (QAOA) framework.
The characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres has been transformed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), whose infrared sensitivity enables transmission spectroscopy at unprecedented precision. However, stellar heterogeneities (e.g., spots and faculae) remain a dominant source of contamination that can bias atmospheric retrievals if not properly corrected. We present a methodology for reducing stellar contamination and instrument-specific noise from exoplanet transmission spectra using neural networks, in particular the so-called Denoising AutoEncoders (DAEs). Our goals are to enable fast, accurate corrections that improve the reliability of atmospheric parameter retrievals and to promote the use of unsupervised algorithms for efficient data processing. We designed and trained DAE architectures using large synthetic datasets of terrestrial (TRAPPIST-1e analogues) and sub-Neptune (K2-18b analogues) planets. Atmospheric retrieval experiments were then performed on contaminated spectra in order to compare our deep-learning approach against standard correction methods in terms of accuracy and computational cost. Our autoencoders successfully reconstruct uncontaminated spectra, preserving essential molecular features even in low-S/N regimes. In retrieval tests, the denoising autoencoder pre-processing yields atmospheric parameter estimates broadly comparable to those obtained with simultaneous stellar-contamination fitting. Notably, our method maintains a much lower computational cost, approximately one order of magnitude smaller. These results demonstrate that DAEs outperform conventional correction methods in computational efficiency while maintaining high accuracy, paving the way for their integration into future atmospheric characterization pipelines for both rocky and sub-Neptune exoplanets.
David S. Duque-Casta\~no, Lauren Flor-Torres, Jorge I. Zuluaga· 0 citations
LSTR (Latent Sparse Transcoder Reasoning), a framework that turns sparse transcoders from post-hoc diagnostic tools into in-loop, intervenable transition components for latent reasoning, and suggests that sparse latent transitions can preserve the compression benefits of latent reasoning while making the resulting trajectories more inspectable and intervenable.
Yadong Wang, Hao-Dong Chen, Yu Tian et al.· 0 citations
Multimodal fusion is often treated as an optimization-balancing problem, where training signals are adjusted to prevent one modality from dominating the others. However, balanced optimization does not fully determine the geometry of intermediate representations. Supervised multimodal models may still learn low-diversity modality-specific embeddings or allow paired cross-modal observations to drift excessively apart, weakening both unimodal robustness and multimodal fusion.
We introduce \regName, a lightweight plug-and-play geometric regularization framework for multimodal representation learning. Rather than enforcing rigid cross-modal alignment, \regName follows a bounded-agreement principle: preserve modality-specific diversity while softly constraining only the portion of paired cross-modal drift that exceeds an admissible agreement band. Operationally, \regName combines a dispersion term that mitigates spectral concentration with an agreement-band anchoring term that controls excessive paired drift, requiring no architectural modification or inference-time overhead.
Experiments across audio-visual, image-text, and RF-based benchmarks show that \regName consistently improves multimodal performance and often strengthens unimodal representations. These results suggest that explicitly regulating representation geometry is an effective complement to optimization balancing, and provide evidence that geometry-aware regularization can improve multimodal learning across diverse architectures and domains.
Zixuan Xia, Hao Wang, Pengcheng Weng et al.· 0 citations
LLMs expand accessibility and provide wide-reaching access to information. Yet these interactions also create opportunities to embed subtle, goal-oriented behaviours that shape what users think and how they behave, a concern reflected in governance frameworks that prohibit manipulative AI. We refer to these behaviours as hidden intentions: covert agendas embedded in a model's outputs that can manipulate users' beliefs and actions. In this work, we examine whether hidden intentions can be identified and characterised, and assess whether detection can serve as a mitigation strategy. To operationalise this, we introduce a social-science-grounded set of ten hidden intention categories and show that they are trivially inducible. A case study further confirms that all ten categories manifest in deployed LLMs. We then evaluate static classifiers and LLM judges on these categories, providing the first systematic analysis of why hidden intentions are difficult to detect. Our stress tests show that, unless false-positive rates are vanishingly small, auditing is dominated by precision-prevalence trade-offs. Capability scaling and reasoning models do not close this gap, suggesting a fundamental challenge for open-world detection. These findings expose a core gap of current AI governance: without new auditing paradigms for open-world, low-prevalence risks, bans on manipulative AI remain difficult to enforce.
Devansh Srivastav, David Pape, Lea Sch\"onherr· 0 citations
Solving massive-scale optimization problems requires scalable first-order methods with low per-iteration cost. This tutorial highlights a shift in optimization: using differentiable programming not only to execute algorithms but to learn how to design them. Modern frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, and JAX enable this paradigm through efficient automatic differentiation. Embedding first-order methods within these systems allows end-to-end training that improves convergence and solution quality. Guided by Fenchel-Rockafellar duality, the tutorial demonstrates how duality-informed iterative schemes such as the alternating direction method of multipliers, and the primal-dual hybrid gradient can be learned and adapted through representative case studies.
Social understanding abilities are crucial for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to interpret human social interactions. We introduce SOCIAL CAPTION, a framework grounded in interaction theory to evaluate social understanding abilities of MLLMs along three dimensions: Social Inference (SI), the ability to make accurate inferences about interactions; Holistic Social Analysis (HSA), the ability to generate comprehensive descriptions of interactions; Directed Social Analysis (DSA), the ability to generate relevant information from interactions. We analyze factors influencing model performance in social understanding, such as scale, architectural design, and spoken context. Experiments with MLLM judges demonstrate a path towards scaling automated evaluation of multimodal social understanding.
Leena Mathur, Bhaavanaa Thumu, Youssouf Kebe et al.· 0 citations
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate in high-stakes settings where demographic attributes such as race and ethnicity may be explicitly stated or implicitly suggested through textual cues. However, existing studies primarily document outcome-level disparities, offering limited insight into internal mechanisms underlying these effects. We present a mechanistic study of how race and ethnicity cues are represented and operationalized within LLMs. Using two publicly available datasets spanning toxicity-related generation and clinical narrative understanding tasks, we analyze three open-source models with a reproducible interpretability pipeline combining probing, neuron-level attribution, and targeted intervention. We find that sensitivity to demographic cues is distributed across internal units and varies substantially across models. These units often align with entangled semantic facets, including explicit group labels, geography, language, culture, and associations related to stereotypes. Interventions on selected units can change some biased prediction patterns, but substantial residual effects remain, suggesting that effective mitigation requires understanding distributed, task-specific mechanisms rather than manipulating a small set of identified neurons alone. Code: https://github.com/LARK-NLP-Lab/LLM-Bias-Interpretability.
Competitive programming remains challenging for code LLMs. Despite recent progress, many training pipelines still depend on scarce real-world data, raising concerns about scalability and near-duplicate benchmark contamination. In this paper, we examine whether synthetic training artifacts can support the complete SFT-to-RL cycle for competitive programming: no real-world tasks, solutions, or test cases are directly used for post-training. To this end, we synthesize tasks, verified solutions, and reliable test cases that serve as reward signals for reinforcement learning. To improve reward reliability, we introduce a dual-verification strategy that reduces noise in both selected solutions and test outputs. Using this high-quality data, we train the X-Coder model series. X-Coder-14B achieves 67.5\% avg@8 on LiveCodeBench v5 and 63.4\% on v6, outperforming its base model by over 40 points. Further analysis provides practical insights into synthetic post-training, highlighting the value of diverse tasks, verified long-CoT supervision, and code-centric reinforcement. Our data and models are released at https://github.com/JieWu02/X-Coder
A weeklong summer workshop brought higher education faculty to campus to explore how AI and machine learning materials can be adapted for their classrooms.
A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduAug 24, 2026
