A new framework designs experiments for better decision-making.
problem Suboptimal experimental designs for downstream decision-making.
method Amortized decision-aware Bayesian Experimental Design (BED) with Transformer Neural Decision Process (TNDP).
result TNDP effectively designs experiments and facilitates accurate decision-making.
GoBOED optimizes experiments for specific decision-making objectives, improving downstream outcomes.
problem Reducing parameter uncertainty does not always improve decision-making in critical settings.
method Combines variational posterior surrogate and differentiable convex decision layer for gradient-based design optimization.
result GoBOED identifies designs that better align with specific decision objectives and reveals wider optimal design windows.
New approach to fairness in machine learning models using conformal prediction.
problem Fairness in machine learning models' downstream decision-making.
method Theoretical derivation and empirical evaluation of label-clustered conformal prediction.
result Label-clustered conformal prediction often provides a favorable balance between utility and substantive fairness.
Algorithm improves decision-making with partially observed contexts using pretrained models.
problem Improving decision-making with partially observed contexts in online linear contextual bandits.
method PULSE-UCB algorithm that uses pretrained models trained on auxiliary data to impute missing features.
result Achieves near-optimal performance in i.i.d. context case with Hölder-smooth missing features.
Linguistic calibration improves long-form text confidence.
problem LMs hallucinate, leading to suboptimal decisions.
method Defining linguistic calibration, training framework, reinforcement learning.
result Llama 2 7B is significantly more calibrated than baselines.
Bayesian models quantify uncertainty and facilitate optimal decision-making in downstream applications. For most models, however, practitioners are forced to use approximate inference techniques that lead to sub-optimal decisions due to incorrect posterior predictive distributions. We present a novel approach that corr…
Proposes FairRR to improve fairness in machine learning models through randomized response.
problem Achieving group fairness in machine learning models.
method Formulates group fairness as optimizing a design matrix in Randomized Response, proposing FairRR.
result Demonstrates FairRR yields excellent model utility and fairness.
FWC creates fair synthetic samples for machine learning tasks.
problem Addressing biases in machine learning models for fair decision-making.
method FWC uses an efficient majority minimization algorithm to minimize Wasserstein distance while enforcing demographic parity.
result FWC achieves a competitive fairness-utility tradeoff and reduces biases in predictions from large language models.
Develops optimal uncertainty quantification for risk-averse decision makers.
problem Quantifying prediction uncertainty for risk-sensitive domains.
method Decision-theoretic foundations connecting uncertainty quantification with risk-averse decision-making.
result Risk-Averse Calibration (RAC) algorithm provides optimal prediction sets for risk-averse decision makers.
Optimal decision-making using prediction sets to minimize risk.
problem Using prediction sets optimally for decision-making in uncertain scenarios.
method Decision-theoretic framework that seeks to minimize expected loss against a worst-case distribution.
result ROCP algorithm reduces critical mistakes compared to baselines, especially in costly out-of-set errors.
Cost-effective method detects language model hallucinations.
problem Detecting unreliable outputs from LLMs.
method Pipeline including confidence score, input attributes calibration, and thresholding.
result Multi-scoring framework outperforms individual methods and reduces computational cost.
LLMs produce volatile sentence-level sentiment classifications that affect financial decision-making.
problem Volatile outputs from LLMs impact financial text understanding tasks.
method Case study on US equity market investing via news sentiment analysis.
result Volatile LLM outputs lead to significant variations in portfolio construction and returns.
Study shows uncertainty of deep learning models can be measured from their embeddings.
problem Uncertainty in contrastive learning models for critical applications.
method Estimating the distribution of training data in embedding space and accounting for local consistency.
result Uncertainty of an embedding vector correlates strongly with downstream accuracy.
The paper proposes a method to learn and leverage contextual preference distributions for better decision-making.
problem Heterogeneous and context-dependent human preferences in decision-making problems.
method A sequential learning-and-optimization pipeline using a bounded-variance score function gradient estimator to train a predictive model mapping contextual features to preference distributions.
result The approach reduces average post-decision surprise by up to 25 times compared to risk-averse baselines in a ridesharing environment.
New method optimizes Gaussian process allocation for BO.
problem Existing methods for inducing point allocation in BO hinder performance.
method Proposes a new allocation strategy using quality-diversity decomposition.
result Demonstrates improved BO performance through local high-fidelity modeling.
Optimizes decision-making with uncertain variables using auxiliary observations.
problem Contextual stochastic optimization problems with uncertain variables and rich auxiliary observations.
method Trains forest decision policies by growing trees that optimize downstream decision quality, using optimization perturbation analysis for efficient approximations.
result Proves asymptotic optimality and empirical validation of the method's performance and efficiency.
Proposes a new machine learning problem for automated temporal decision-making.
problem Automating human involvement in temporal decision-making processes.
method Develops a deep Bayesian neural network, ForeClassNet, with Boltzmann convolutions.
result Achieves superior performance in real-world Foreclassing datasets.
Develops methods for AI self-assessment to improve trustworthiness.
problem Uncertainty in AI predictions and lack of trust in AI systems.
method Uncertainty estimation techniques considering practical impacts and costs.
result Guidelines for selecting and designing effective AI self-assessment methods.
Complex networks are often either too large for full exploration, partially accessible, or partially observed. Downstream learning tasks on these incomplete networks can produce low quality results. In addition, reducing the incompleteness of the network can be costly and nontrivial. As a result, network discovery algo…
End-to-end model predicts multiagent trajectories using game theory and neural nets.
problem Predicting trajectories of interacting agents in complex scenarios.
method Hybrid neural net with game-theoretic reasoning, using implicit layers to map preferences to Nash equilibria.
result Trains an interpretable model that predicts future trajectories and transfers to decision making.
This paper generalizes BO uncertainty measures using decision-theoretic entropies.
problem Efficiently inferring optima of expensive black-box functions.
method Introduces a generalized entropy measure from statistical decision theory to optimize Bayesian optimization.
result Demonstrates strong empirical performance across various sequential decision-making tasks.
Universal algorithm learns unknown distribution for various decision-making problems.
problem Various statistical measures in contextual sequential decision-making.
method Infinite-dimensional functional regression oracle for cumulative distribution functions.
result Utility regret rate bounded by polynomial decay of eigenvalue sequence.
New approach calibrates predictions for better decision-making.
problem Achieving reliable predictions for multi-class problems is hard.
method Introduces decision calibration, a new approach to calibrate predictions.
result Designs a recalibration algorithm that makes predictions reliable for decision-making.
DiffLOB models future market conditions for better decision-making.
problem Passive generative models cannot explore hypothetical market scenarios.
method Regime-conditioned diffusion model for counterfactual LOB generation.
result DiffLOB enables realistic and controllable generation of LOB trajectories.
Study improves confidence measures in medical imaging pipelines by addressing bias.
problem Bias in metric-based imaging pipelines compromises the efficiency of prediction intervals.
method Formalized symmetric and asymmetric CP formulations, analyzed bias effects, and validated empirically.
result Symmetric intervals are inflated by bias, while asymmetric intervals remain unaffected.
Survey on calibration in machine learning, viewing it as indistinguishability.
problem Evaluating continuous probability predictions in discrete outcome settings.
method Defining and measuring calibration error through indistinguishability.
result Calibration measures quantify distinguishability between hypothesized and real-world outcomes.
People are rated and ranked, towards algorithmic decision making in an increasing number of applications, typically based on machine learning. Research on how to incorporate fairness into such tasks has prevalently pursued the paradigm of group fairness: giving adequate success rates to specifically protected groups. I…
A new method for fair classification using characteristic function distance.
problem Fairness in high-stakes decision-making with sensitive groups.
method Proposes a novel approach based on characteristic function distance to ensure minimal sensitive information in learned representations.
result Consistently matches or achieves better fairness and predictive accuracy than existing methods.
Paper uses diffusion model to denoise financial time series data.
problem Low signal-to-noise ratio in financial time series data.
method Conditional diffusion model for progressive noise addition and removal.
result Denoised financial time series improve future return classification and trading performance.
A new model optimizes portfolios by learning stock return distributions conditioned on factors.
problem Optimizing portfolios with high-dimensional asset-specific factors.
method Conditional Diffusion Transformer architecture linking each asset's return to its factor vector.
result The model outperforms benchmarks in mean-variance and mean-CVaR optimization.
Contextual linear optimization shows naive plug-in methods can outperform direct optimization.
problem Optimizing decisions with side observations to reduce uncertainty.
method Using off-the-shelf machine learning methods to learn a predictive model and plug it in for optimization.
result The naive plug-in approach achieves faster regret convergence rates than direct optimization methods.
A smart method predicts and optimizes decisions online with resource constraints.
problem Online decision-making with resource constraints.
method Combines prediction and optimization with dual update using mirror descent.
result Regret bounds and convergence rates for general convex feasible regions.
Customer scoring models are the core of scalable direct marketing. Uplift models provide an estimate of the incremental benefit from a treatment that is used for operational decision-making. Training and monitoring of uplift models require experimental data. However, the collection of data under randomized treatment as…
New framework ensures valid uncertainty estimates for any data stream changes.
problem Challenges of distribution shifts and adversarial actors in real-world data streams.
method Leveraging Blackwell approachability from game theory, the framework guarantees calibrated uncertainties for any compact space.
result Improves calibration and decision-making for energy systems.
Representation learning is a central challenge across a range of machine learning areas. In reinforcement learning, effective and functional representations have the potential to tremendously accelerate learning progress and solve more challenging problems. Most prior work on representation learning has focused on gene…
To be successful in real-world tasks, Reinforcement Learning (RL) needs to exploit the compositional, relational, and hierarchical structure of the world, and learn to transfer it to the task at hand. Recent advances in representation learning for language make it possible to build models that acquire world knowledge f…
LLMs compress financial texts, but distort decision-making.
problem LLMs compress financial texts, altering decision-making.
method Analyzed two diagnostic patterns: decontextualization and model dependency. Proposed Agentic Context Compression.
result LLM-compressed financial texts alter decision-making.
Paper proposes consistent estimators for learning to defer decisions to experts.
problem Learning algorithms often ignore expert decision-making in practical scenarios.
method Reduction to cost sensitive learning, novel surrogate loss for consistent estimation.
result Effective approach demonstrated on various tasks, showing consistency.
This work improves neural network trustworthiness through uncertainty estimation.
problem Overconfident neural networks lead to poor performance under distribution shifts.
method Develops a general uncertainty framework for neural networks, including classification with rejection.
result Improves model trustworthiness and robustness in decision-making tasks.
New decision-theoretic calibration error metric improves prediction reliability.
problem Improving the reliability of predictions for decision-making.
method Proposed Calibration Decision Loss (CDL) and an efficient algorithm to achieve near-optimal CDL.
result Near-optimal CDL guarantees vanishing payoff loss from miscalibration.
This paper investigates multi-task reinforcement learning in non-Markovian decision making, showing benefits in sample efficiency.
problem Investigating multi-task reinforcement learning in non-Markovian decision making processes.
method Developed a joint model class for tasks and used the η-bracketing number to quantify complexity and similarity. result Multi-task reinforcement learning can improve sample efficiency in non-Markovian decision making processes.
To make decisions based on a model fit with auto-encoding variational Bayes (AEVB), practitioners often let the variational distribution serve as a surrogate for the posterior distribution. This approach yields biased estimates of the expected risk, and therefore leads to poor decisions for two reasons. First, the mode…
Theoretical analysis shows pretext-based self-supervised learning can be boosted by downstream data under certain conditions.
problem Theoretical analysis of pretext-based self-supervised learning and downstream data refinement.
method Theoretical analysis and experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets.
result Theoretical lower bounds and experiments show that downstream data refinement can boost or hurt performance depending on conditions.
This study examines how the size and alignment of pretraining data affect the performance of large language models on downstream tasks.
problem Understanding how the size and alignment of pretraining data impact the performance of large language models on downstream tasks.
method Investigated the scaling behavior of large language models in a transfer learning setting, focusing on machine translation tasks.
result The size of the finetuning dataset and the distribution alignment between pretraining and downstream data significantly influence the scaling behavior of downstream performance.
Paper defines and solves a problem in representation learning to ensure fairness with high confidence.
problem Learning fair representations with high confidence guarantees for all downstream tasks.
method Formally defines the problem, introduces FRG framework, proves high probability fairness, and demonstrates effectiveness empirically.
result FRG framework provides high-confidence guarantees for limiting unfairness across all downstream models and tasks.
Study shows how pretraining robustness transfers to downstream tasks.
problem Understanding how robustness is transferred from pretraining to downstream tasks.
method Theoretical analysis and practical validation of robustness constraints.
result Robustness of a linear predictor on downstream tasks can be constrained by the robustness of its underlying representation.
Self-supervised metric learning boosts downstream tasks in multi-view data.
problem Improving distance-based downstream tasks without labeled data.
method Developed a statistical framework to study self-supervised metric learning in multi-view data.
result Self-supervised metric learning improves target distances for various downstream tasks.
Paper proposes a new method for demand forecasting in pricing contexts.
problem Demand forecasting in pricing contexts, especially in a profit optimal manner.
method Combines Double Machine Learning for causal inference and transformer-based forecasting models.
result Our method outperforms other forecasting methods in off-policy settings.