pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Predictors of Childhood Vaccination Uptake in England: An Explainable Machine Learning Analysis of Longitudinal Regional Data (2021-2024)
Authors: Amin Noroozi, Sidratul Muntaha Esha, Mansoureh Ghari
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

Childhood vaccination is a cornerstone of public health, yet disparities in vaccination coverage persist across England. These disparities are shaped by complex interactions among various factors, including geographic, demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural (GDSC) factors. Previous studies mostly rely on cross-sectional data and traditional statistical approaches that assess individual or limited sets of variables in isolation. Such methods may fall short in capturing the dynamic and multivariate nature of vaccine uptake. In this paper, we conducted a longitudinal machine learning analysis of childhood vaccination coverage across 150 districts in England from 2021 to 2024. Using vaccination data from NHS records, we applied hierarchical clustering to group districts by vaccination coverage into low- and high-coverage clusters. A CatBoost classifier was then trained to predict districts' vaccination clusters using their GDSC data. Finally, the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) method was used to interpret the predictors' importance. The classifier achieved high accuracies of 92.1, 90.6, and 86.3 in predicting districts' vaccination clusters for the years 2021-2022, 2022-2023, and 2023-2024, respectively. SHAP revealed that geographic, cultural, and demographic variables, particularly rurality, English language proficiency, the percentage of foreign-born residents, and ethnic composition, were the most influential predictors of vaccination coverage, whereas socioeconomic variables, such as deprivation and employment, consistently showed lower importance, especially in 2023-2024. Surprisingly, rural districts were significantly more likely to have higher vaccination rates. Additionally, districts with lower vaccination coverage had higher populations whose first language was not English, who were born outside the UK, or who were from ethnic minority groups.
Learning to Attribute with Attention
Authors: Benjamin Cohen-Wang, Yung-Sung Chuang, Aleksander Madry
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering

Given a sequence of tokens generated by a language model, we may want to identify the preceding tokens that influence the model to generate this sequence. Performing such token attribution is expensive; a common approach is to ablate preceding tokens and directly measure their effects. To reduce the cost of token attribution, we revisit attention weights as a heuristic for how a language model uses previous tokens. Naive approaches to attribute model behavior with attention (e.g., averaging attention weights across attention heads to estimate a token's influence) have been found to be unreliable. To attain faithful attributions, we propose treating the attention weights of different attention heads as features. This way, we can learn how to effectively leverage attention weights for attribution (using signal from ablations). Our resulting method, Attribution with Attention (AT2), reliably performs on par with approaches that involve many ablations, while being significantly more efficient. To showcase the utility of AT2, we use it to prune less important parts of a provided context in a question answering setting, improving answer quality. We provide code for AT2 at https://github.com/MadryLab/AT2 .
Dynamic Regularized CBDT: Variance-Calibrated Causal Boosting for Interpretable Heterogeneous Treatment Effects
Authors: Yichen Liu
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation

Heterogeneous treatment effect estimation in high-stakes applications demands models that simultaneously optimize precision, interpretability, and calibration. Many existing tree-based causal inference techniques, however, exhibit high estimation errors when applied to observational data because they struggle to capture complex interactions among factors and rely on static regularization schemes. In this work, we propose Dynamic Regularized Causal Boosted Decision Trees (CBDT), a novel framework that integrates variance regularization and average treatment effect calibration into the loss function of gradient boosted decision trees. Our approach dynamically updates the regularization parameters using gradient statistics to better balance the bias-variance tradeoff. Extensive experiments on standard benchmark datasets and real-world clinical data demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves estimation accuracy while maintaining reliable coverage of true treatment effects. In an intensive care unit patient triage study, the method successfully identified clinically actionable rules and achieved high accuracy in treatment effect estimation. The results validate that dynamic regularization can effectively tighten error bounds and enhance both predictive performance and model interpretability.
MEGA: Second-Order Gradient Alignment for Catastrophic Forgetting Mitigation in GFSCIL
Authors: Jinhui Pang, Changqing Lin, Hao Lin, Jinglin He, ZhengJun Li, Zhihui Zhang, Xiaoshuai Hao
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Continual Learning, Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning, Incremental Learning

Graph Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (GFSCIL) enables models to continually learn from limited samples of novel tasks after initial training on a large base dataset. Existing GFSCIL approaches typically utilize Prototypical Networks (PNs) for metric-based class representations and fine-tune the model during the incremental learning stage. However, these PN-based methods oversimplify learning via novel query set fine-tuning and fail to integrate Graph Continual Learning (GCL) techniques due to architectural constraints. To address these challenges, we propose a more rigorous and practical setting for GFSCIL that excludes query sets during the incremental training phase. Building on this foundation, we introduce Model-Agnostic Meta Graph Continual Learning (MEGA), aimed at effectively alleviating catastrophic forgetting for GFSCIL. Specifically, by calculating the incremental second-order gradient during the meta-training stage, we endow the model to learn high-quality priors that enhance incremental learning by aligning its behaviors across both the meta-training and incremental learning stages. Extensive experiments on four mainstream graph datasets demonstrate that MEGA achieves state-of-the-art results and enhances the effectiveness of various GCL methods in GFSCIL. We believe that our proposed MEGA serves as a model-agnostic GFSCIL paradigm, paving the way for future research.
Generating new coordination compounds via multireference simulations, genetic algorithms and machine learning: the case of Co(II) molecular magnets
Authors: Lion Frangoulis, Zahra Khatibi, Lorenzo A. Mariano, Alessandro Lunghi
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

The design of coordination compounds with target properties often requires years of continuous feedback loop between theory, simulations and experiments. In the case of magnetic molecules, this conventional strategy has indeed led to the breakthrough of single-molecule magnets with working temperatures above nitrogen's boiling point, but at significant costs in terms of resources and time. Here, we propose a computational strategy able to accelerate the discovery of new coordination compounds with desired electronic and magnetic properties. Our approach is based on a combination of high-throughput multireference ab initio methods, genetic algorithms and machine learning. While genetic algorithms allow for an intelligent sampling of the vast chemical space available, machine learning reduces the computational cost by pre-screening molecular properties in advance of their accurate and automated multireference ab initio characterization. Importantly, the presented framework is able to generate novel organic ligands and explore chemical motifs beyond those available in pre-existing structural databases. We showcase the power of this approach by automatically generating new Co(II) mononuclear coordination compounds with record magnetic properties in a fraction of the time required by either experiments or brute-force ab initio approaches
Efficient algorithms for the Hadamard decomposition
Authors: Samuel Wertz, Arnaud Vandaele, Nicolas Gillis
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

The Hadamard decomposition is a powerful technique for data analysis and matrix compression, which decomposes a given matrix into the element-wise product of two or more low-rank matrices. In this paper, we develop an efficient algorithm to solve this problem, leveraging an alternating optimization approach that decomposes the global non-convex problem into a series of convex sub-problems. To improve performance, we explore advanced initialization strategies inspired by the singular value decomposition (SVD) and incorporate acceleration techniques by introducing momentum-based updates. Beyond optimizing the two-matrix case, we also extend the Hadamard decomposition framework to support more than two low-rank matrices, enabling approximations with higher effective ranks while preserving computational efficiency. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to compare our method with the existing gradient descent-based approaches for the Hadamard decomposition and with traditional low-rank approximation techniques. The results highlight the effectiveness of our proposed method across diverse datasets.
Fairness and Robustness in Machine Unlearning
Authors: Khoa Tran, Simon S. Woo
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Machine Unlearning

Machine unlearning poses the challenge of ``how to eliminate the influence of specific data from a pretrained model'' in regard to privacy concerns. While prior research on approximated unlearning has demonstrated accuracy and efficiency in time complexity, we claim that it falls short of achieving exact unlearning, and we are the first to focus on fairness and robustness in machine unlearning algorithms. Our study presents fairness Conjectures for a well-trained model, based on the variance-bias trade-off characteristic, and considers their relevance to robustness. Our Conjectures are supported by experiments conducted on the two most widely used model architectures, ResNet and ViT, demonstrating the correlation between fairness and robustness: \textit{the higher fairness-gap is, the more the model is sensitive and vulnerable}. In addition, our experiments demonstrate the vulnerability of current state-of-the-art approximated unlearning algorithms to adversarial attacks, where their unlearned models suffer a significant drop in accuracy compared to the exact-unlearned models. We claim that our fairness-gap measurement and robustness metric should be used to evaluate the unlearning algorithm. Furthermore, we demonstrate that unlearning in the intermediate and last layers is sufficient and cost-effective for time and memory complexity.
How to Achieve Higher Accuracy with Less Training Points?
Authors: Jinghan Yang, Anupam Pani, Yunchao Zhang
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification

In the era of large-scale model training, the extensive use of available datasets has resulted in significant computational inefficiencies. To tackle this issue, we explore methods for identifying informative subsets of training data that can achieve comparable or even superior model performance. We propose a technique based on influence functions to determine which training samples should be included in the training set. We conducted empirical evaluations of our method on binary classification tasks utilizing logistic regression models. Our approach demonstrates performance comparable to that of training on the entire dataset while using only 10% of the data. Furthermore, we found that our method achieved even higher accuracy when trained with just 60% of the data.
MSTIM: A MindSpore-Based Model for Traffic Flow Prediction
Authors: Weiqi Qin, Yuxin Liu, Dongze Wu, Zhenkai Qin, Qining Luo
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

Aiming at the problems of low accuracy and large error fluctuation of traditional traffic flow predictionmodels when dealing with multi-scale temporal features and dynamic change patterns. this paperproposes a multi-scale time series information modelling model MSTIM based on the Mindspore framework, which integrates long and short-term memory networks (LSTMs), convolutional neural networks (CNN), and the attention mechanism to improve the modelling accuracy and stability. The Metropolitan Interstate Traffic Volume (MITV) dataset was used for the experiments and compared and analysed with typical LSTM-attention models, CNN-attention models and LSTM-CNN models. The experimental results show that the MSTIM model achieves better results in the metrics of Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Square Error (MSE), and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), which significantly improves the accuracy and stability of the traffic volume prediction.
Bayesian continual learning and forgetting in neural networks
Authors: Djohan Bonnet, Kellian Cottart, Tifenn Hirtzlin, Tarcisius Januel, Thomas Dalgaty, Elisa Vianello, Damien Querlioz
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Continual Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Permuted-MNIST

Biological synapses effortlessly balance memory retention and flexibility, yet artificial neural networks still struggle with the extremes of catastrophic forgetting and catastrophic remembering. Here, we introduce Metaplasticity from Synaptic Uncertainty (MESU), a Bayesian framework that updates network parameters according their uncertainty. This approach allows a principled combination of learning and forgetting that ensures that critical knowledge is preserved while unused or outdated information is gradually released. Unlike standard Bayesian approaches -- which risk becoming overly constrained, and popular continual-learning methods that rely on explicit task boundaries, MESU seamlessly adapts to streaming data. It further provides reliable epistemic uncertainty estimates, allowing out-of-distribution detection, the only computational cost being to sample the weights multiple times to provide proper output statistics. Experiments on image-classification benchmarks demonstrate that MESU mitigates catastrophic forgetting, while maintaining plasticity for new tasks. When training 200 sequential permuted MNIST tasks, MESU outperforms established continual learning techniques in terms of accuracy, capability to learn additional tasks, and out-of-distribution data detection. Additionally, due to its non-reliance on task boundaries, MESU outperforms conventional learning techniques on the incremental training of CIFAR-100 tasks consistently in a wide range of scenarios. Our results unify ideas from metaplasticity, Bayesian inference, and Hessian-based regularization, offering a biologically-inspired pathway to robust, perpetual learning.
Can Local Representation Alignment RNNs Solve Temporal Tasks?
Authors: Nikolay Manchev, Luis C. Garcia-Peraza-Herrera
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Time Series Forecasting

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are commonly used for real-time processing, streaming data, and cases where the amount of training samples is limited. Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) is the predominant algorithm for training RNNs; however, it is frequently criticized for being prone to exploding and vanishing gradients and being biologically implausible. In this paper, we present and evaluate a target propagation-based method for RNNs, which uses local updates and seeks to reduce the said instabilities. Having stable RNN models increases their practical use in a wide range of fields such as natural language processing, time-series forecasting, anomaly detection, control systems, and robotics. The proposed solution uses local representation alignment (LRA). We thoroughly analyze the performance of this method, experiment with normalization and different local error functions, and invalidate certain assumptions about the behavior of this type of learning. Namely, we demonstrate that despite the decomposition of the network into sub-graphs, the model still suffers from vanishing gradients. We also show that gradient clipping as proposed in LRA has little to no effect on network performance. This results in an LRA RNN model that is very difficult to train due to vanishing gradients. We address this by introducing gradient regularization in the direction of the update and demonstrate that this modification promotes gradient flow and meaningfully impacts convergence. We compare and discuss the performance of the algorithm, and we show that the regularized LRA RNN considerably outperforms the unregularized version on three landmark tasks: temporal order, 3-bit temporal order, and random permutation.
Cross-Modal Temporal Fusion for Financial Market Forecasting
Authors: Yunhua Pei, John Cartlidge, Anandadeep Mandal, Daniel Gold, Enrique Marcilio, Riccardo Mazzon
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00

Accurate financial market forecasting requires diverse data sources, including historical price trends, macroeconomic indicators, and financial news, each contributing unique predictive signals. However, existing methods often process these modalities independently or fail to effectively model their interactions. In this paper, we introduce Cross-Modal Temporal Fusion (CMTF), a novel transformer-based framework that integrates heterogeneous financial data to improve predictive accuracy. Our approach employs attention mechanisms to dynamically weight the contribution of different modalities, along with a specialized tensor interpretation module for feature extraction. To facilitate rapid model iteration in industry applications, we incorporate a mature auto-training scheme that streamlines optimization. When applied to real-world financial datasets, CMTF demonstrates improvements over baseline models in forecasting stock price movements and provides a scalable and effective solution for cross-modal integration in financial market prediction.
Latent Tensor Factorization with Nonlinear PID Control for Missing Data Recovery in Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring
Authors: Yiran Wang, Tangtang Xie, Hao Wu
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Missing Values, Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) has emerged as a key smart grid technology, identifying electrical device and providing detailed energy consumption data for precise demand response management. Nevertheless, NILM data suffers from missing values due to inescapable factors like sensor failure, leading to inaccuracies in non-intrusive load monitoring. A stochastic gradient descent (SGD)-based latent factorization of tensors model has proven to be effective in estimating missing data, however, it updates a latent factor solely based on the current stochastic gradient, without considering past information, which leads to slow convergence of anLFT model. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Nonlinear Proportional-integral-derivative (PID)-Incorporated Latent factorization of tensors (NPIL) model with two-fold ideas: a) rebuilding the instant learning error according to the principle of a nonlinear PID controller, thus, the past update information is efficiently incorporated into the learning scheme, and b) implementing gain parameter adaptation by utilizing particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, hence, the model computational efficiency is effectively improved. Experimental results on real-world NILM datasets demonstrate that the proposed NPIL model surpasses state-of-the-art models in convergence rate and accuracy when predicting the missing NILM data.
Safety Monitoring for Learning-Enabled Cyber-Physical Systems in Out-of-Distribution Scenarios
Authors: Vivian Lin, Ramneet Kaur, Yahan Yang, Souradeep Dutta, Yiannis Kantaros, Anirban Roy, Susmit Jha, Oleg Sokolsky, Insup Lee
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Incremental Learning, Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification

The safety of learning-enabled cyber-physical systems is compromised by the well-known vulnerabilities of deep neural networks to out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. Existing literature has sought to monitor the safety of such systems by detecting OOD data. However, such approaches have limited utility, as the presence of an OOD input does not necessarily imply the violation of a desired safety property. We instead propose to directly monitor safety in a manner that is itself robust to OOD data. To this end, we predict violations of signal temporal logic safety specifications based on predicted future trajectories. Our safety monitor additionally uses a novel combination of adaptive conformal prediction and incremental learning. The former obtains probabilistic prediction guarantees even on OOD data, and the latter prevents overly conservative predictions. We evaluate the efficacy of the proposed approach in two case studies on safety monitoring: 1) predicting collisions of an F1Tenth car with static obstacles, and 2) predicting collisions of a race car with multiple dynamic obstacles. We find that adaptive conformal prediction obtains theoretical guarantees where other uncertainty quantification methods fail to do so. Additionally, combining adaptive conformal prediction and incremental learning for safety monitoring achieves high recall and timeliness while reducing loss in precision. We achieve these results even in OOD settings and outperform alternative methods.
Are you SURE? Enhancing Multimodal Pretraining with Missing Modalities through Uncertainty Estimation
Authors: Duy A. Nguyen, Quan Huu Do, Khoa D. Doan, Minh N. Do
Date: 2025-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Genre classification, Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal learning has demonstrated incredible successes by integrating diverse data sources, yet it often relies on the availability of all modalities - an assumption that rarely holds in real-world applications. Pretrained multimodal models, while effective, struggle when confronted with small-scale and incomplete datasets (i.e., missing modalities), limiting their practical applicability. Previous studies on reconstructing missing modalities have overlooked the reconstruction's potential unreliability, which could compromise the quality of the final outputs. We present SURE (Scalable Uncertainty and Reconstruction Estimation), a novel framework that extends the capabilities of pretrained multimodal models by introducing latent space reconstruction and uncertainty estimation for both reconstructed modalities and downstream tasks. Our method is architecture-agnostic, reconstructs missing modalities, and delivers reliable uncertainty estimates, improving both interpretability and performance. SURE introduces a unique Pearson Correlation-based loss and applies statistical error propagation in deep networks for the first time, allowing precise quantification of uncertainties from missing data and model predictions. Extensive experiments across tasks such as sentiment analysis, genre classification, and action recognition show that SURE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, ensuring robust predictions even in the presence of incomplete data.