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ImplicitRM: Unbiased Reward Modeling from Implicit Preference Data for LLM alignment

arXiv:2603.23184v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reward modeling represents a long-standing challenge in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for aligning language models. Current reward modeling is heavily contingent upon experimental feedback data with high collection costs. In this work, we study \textit{implicit reward modeling} -- learning reward models from implicit human feedback (e.g., clicks and copies) -- as a cost-effective alternative. We identify two fundamental challenges in implicit reward modeling: (1) Implicit preference data lacks definitive negative samples, which makes standard positive-negative classification methods inapplicable; (2) Implicit preference data suffers from user preference bias, where different responses have different propensities to elicit user feedback actions, which exacerbates the difficulty of distinguishing definitive negative samples. To address these challenges, we propose ImplicitRM, which aims to learn unbiased reward models from implicit preference data. ImplicitRM stratifies training samples into four latent groups via a stratification model. Building on this, it derives a learning objective through likelihood maximization, which we prove is theoretically unbiased, effectively resolving both challenges. Experiments demonstrate that ImplicitRM learns accurate reward models across implicit preference datasets. Code is available on our project website.

Leveraging LLMs and Social Media to Understand User Perception of Smartphone-Based Earthquake Early Warnings

arXiv:2603.23322v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Android's Earthquake Alert (AEA) system provided timely early warnings to millions during the Mw 6.2 Marmara Ereglisi, T\"urkiye earthquake on April 23, 2025. This event, the largest in the region in 25 years, served as a critical real-world test for smartphone-based Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) systems. The AEA system successfully delivered alerts to users with high precision, offering over a minute of warning before the strongest shaking reached urban areas. This study leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze more than 500 public social media posts from the X platform, extracting 42 distinct attributes related to user experience and behavior. Statistical analyses revealed significant relationships, notably a strong correlation between user trust and alert timeliness. Our results indicate a distinction between engineering and the user-centric definition of system accuracy. We found that timeliness is accuracy in the user's mind. Overall, this study provides actionable insights for optimizing alert design, public education campaigns, and future behavioral research to improve the effectiveness of such systems in seismically active regions.

An Accurate and Interpretable Framework for Trustworthy Process Monitoring

arXiv:2302.10426v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trustworthy process monitoring seeks to build an accurate and interpretable monitoring framework, which is critical for ensuring the safety of energy conversion plant (ECP) that operates under extreme working conditions such as high pressure and temperature. Contemporary self-attentive models, however, fall short in this domain for two main reasons. First, they rely on step-wise correlations that fail to involve physically meaningful semantics in ECP logs, resulting in suboptimal accuracy and interpretability. Second, attention matrices are frequently cluttered with spurious correlations that obscure physically meaningful ones, further impeding effective interpretation. To overcome these issues, we propose AttentionMixer, a framework aimed at improving both accuracy and interpretability of existing methods and establish a trustworthy ECP monitoring framework. Specifically, to tackle the first issue, we employ a spatial adaptive message passing block to capture variate-wise correlations. This block is coupled with a temporal adaptive message passing block through an \textit{mixing} operator, yielding a multi-faceted representation of ECP logs accounting for both step-wise and variate-wise correlations. Concurrently, to tackle the second issue, we employ a sparse message passing regularizer to filter out spurious correlations. We validate the efficacy of AttentionMixer using two real-world datasets from the radiation monitoring network for Chinese nuclear power plants.

CITS: Nonparametric Statistical Causal Modeling for High-Resolution Neural Time Series

arXiv:2508.01920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Identifying causal interactions in complex dynamical systems is a fundamental challenge across the computational sciences. Existing functional connectivity methods capture correlations but not causation. While addressing directionality, popular causal inference tools such as Granger causality and the Peter-Clark algorithm rely on restrictive assumptions that limit their applicability to high-resolution time-series data, such as the large-scale recordings now standard in neuroscience. Here, we introduce CITS (Causal Inference in Time Series), a nonparametric framework for inferring statistically causal structure from multivariate time series. CITS models dynamics using a structural causal model of arbitrary Markov order and statistical tests for lagged conditional independence. We prove consistency under mild assumptions and demonstrate superior accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines across simulated linear, nonlinear, and recurrent neural network benchmarks. Applying CITS to large-scale neuronal recordings from the mouse visual cortex, thalamus, and hippocampus, we uncover stimulus-specific causal pathways and inter-regional hierarchies that align with known anatomy while revealing new functional insights. We further highlight CITS ability in accurately identifying conditional dependencies within small inferred neuronal motifs. These results establish CITS as a theoretically grounded and empirically validated method for discovering interpretable statistically causal networks in neural time series. Beyond neuroscience, the framework is broadly applicable to causal discovery in complex temporal systems across domains.
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  • Decomposing Physician Disagreement in HealthBench Satya Borgohain · Roy Mariathas
    arXiv:2602.22758v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We decompose physician disagreement in the HealthBench medical AI evaluation dataset to understand where variance resides and what observable features can explain it. Rubric identity accounts for 15.8% of met/not-met label variance but only 3.6-6.9% of disagreement variance; physician identity accounts for just 2.4%. The dominant 81.8% case-level residual is not reduced by HealthBench's metadata labels (z = -0.22, p = 0.83), normative rubric l
     

Decomposing Physician Disagreement in HealthBench

arXiv:2602.22758v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We decompose physician disagreement in the HealthBench medical AI evaluation dataset to understand where variance resides and what observable features can explain it. Rubric identity accounts for 15.8% of met/not-met label variance but only 3.6-6.9% of disagreement variance; physician identity accounts for just 2.4%. The dominant 81.8% case-level residual is not reduced by HealthBench's metadata labels (z = -0.22, p = 0.83), normative rubric language (pseudo R^2 = 1.2%), medical specialty (0/300 Tukey pairs significant), surface-feature triage (AUC = 0.58), or embeddings (AUC = 0.485). Disagreement follows an inverted-U with completion quality (AUC = 0.689), confirming physicians agree on clearly good or bad outputs but split on borderline cases. Physician-validated uncertainty categories reveal that reducible uncertainty (missing context, ambiguous phrasing) more than doubles disagreement odds (OR = 2.55, p

Detecting Structural Heart Disease from Electrocardiograms via a Generalized Additive Model of Interpretable Foundation-Model Predictors

arXiv:2603.02616v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Structural heart disease (SHD) is a prevalent condition with many undiagnosed cases, and early detection is often limited by the high cost and accessibility constraints of echocardiography (ECHO). Recent studies show that artificial intelligence (AI)-based analysis of electrocardiograms (ECGs) can detect SHD, offering a scalable alternative. However, existing methods are fully black-box models, limiting interpretability and clinical adoption. To address these challenges, we propose an interpretable and effective framework that integrates clinically meaningful ECG foundation-model predictors within a generalized additive model, enabling transparent risk attribution while maintaining strong predictive performance. Using the EchoNext benchmark of over 80,000 ECG-ECHO pairs, the method demonstrates relative improvements of +0.98% in AUROC, +1.01% in AUPRC, and +1.41% in F1 score over the latest state-of-the-art deep-learning baseline, while achieving slightly better performance even with only 30% of the training data. Subgroup analyses confirm robust performance across heterogeneous populations, and the estimated entry-wise functions provide interpretable insights into the relationships between risks of traditional ECG diagnoses and SHD. This work illustrates a complementary paradigm between classical statistical modeling and modern AI, offering a pathway to interpretable, high-performing, and clinically actionable ECG-based SHD screening.

Clust-PSI-PFL: A Population Stability Index Approach for Clustered Non-IID Personalized Federated Learning

arXiv:2512.20363v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) supports privacy-preserving, decentralized machine learning (ML) model training by keeping data on client devices. However, non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data across clients biases updates and degrades performance. To alleviate these issues, we propose Clust-PSI-PFL, a clustering-based personalized FL framework that uses the Population Stability Index (PSI) to quantify the level of non-IID data. We compute a weighted PSI metric, $WPSI^L$, which we show to be more informative than common non-IID metrics (Hellinger, Jensen-Shannon, and Earth Mover's distance). Using PSI features, we form distributionally homogeneous groups of clients via K-means++; the number of optimal clusters is chosen by a systematic silhouette-based procedure, typically yielding few clusters with modest overhead. Across six datasets (tabular, image, and text modalities), two partition protocols (Dirichlet with parameter $\alpha$ and Similarity with parameter S), and multiple client sizes, Clust-PSI-PFL delivers up to 18% higher global accuracy than state-of-the-art baselines and markedly improves client fairness by a relative improvement of 37% under severe non-IID data. These results establish PSI-guided clustering as a principled, lightweight mechanism for robust PFL under label skew.

Adaptive Agents in Spatial Double-Auction Markets: Modeling the Emergence of Industrial Symbiosis

arXiv:2512.17979v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Industrial symbiosis fosters circularity by enabling firms to repurpose residual resources, yet its emergence is constrained by socio-spatial frictions that shape costs, matching opportunities, and market efficiency. Existing models often overlook the interaction between spatial structure, market design, and adaptive firm behavior, limiting our understanding of where and how symbiosis arises. We develop an agent-based model where heterogeneous firms trade byproducts through a spatially embedded double-auction market, with prices and quantities emerging endogenously from local interactions. Leveraging reinforcement learning, firms adapt their bidding strategies to maximize profit while accounting for transport costs, disposal penalties, and resource scarcity. Simulation experiments reveal the economic and spatial conditions under which decentralized exchanges converge toward stable and efficient outcomes. Counterfactual regret analysis shows that sellers' strategies approach a near Nash equilibrium, while sensitivity analysis highlights how spatial structures and market parameters jointly govern circularity. Our model provides a basis for exploring policy interventions that seek to align firm incentives with sustainability goals, and more broadly demonstrates how decentralized coordination can emerge from adaptive agents in spatially constrained markets.
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