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12,814 papers

#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Conformal Prediction Sets Quantify Information Gain: A Theoretical Perspective

Conformal prediction is a popular tool for uncertainty quantification that outputs prediction sets with finite-sample coverage guarantees. While prediction set size is commonly used as a heuristic measure of uncertainty, the information-theoretic basis for this interpretation remains poorly understood. In this work, we...

Kevin B. Zhang, Stephen Bates · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Neural Petri flows for chemical reactions

Petri nets have been used to describe chemical processes such as reactions.They map well to chemistry: Places are the bonds between atoms and the free valence of each atom, a token is a unit of bond order, a transition forms or breaks a bond, the conserved quantities are the valence budgets of the atoms, and the enabli...

Jose Eduardo Escrig Molina, Daniel Probst · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Linear Bandits under Exact Sliding-Window Constraints

We study linear bandits under exact sliding-window constraints, where every consecutive block of actions must belong to a prescribed feasible set. In the offline setting, where the reward function is known, we show that convexity and cyclic-shift invariance make a stationary solution optimal when $w\mid T$ and within a...

Seyed Mohammad Hadi Hosseini, Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori, Sattar Vakili · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Reinforcement Learning with Conformal Action Sets: An Application to Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommenders typically use a fixed slate size even though the number of useful alternatives changes within a session. We propose Reinforcement Learning with Calibrated Pruning (RLCP), which adapts the retained action set using critic scores and an online threshold. The threshold is updated from binary feedba...

Wen-Wen Si, Hong-Hao Wei · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

On the Computational Tractability of Robust Bandits

Learning when the environment does not belong to the learner's hypothesis class is typically handled using agnostic learning guarantees. However, for anything beyond supervised learning, agnostic guarantees are difficult to come by. Recently, imprecise bandits (Kosoy, 2025) (later renamed to robust bandits in Appel and...

Vanessa Kosoy, Vinayak Pathak · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Optimal and Efficient Online Inverse Optimization

In online inverse linear optimization, a learner recommends an action and then observes the choice of an expert who maximizes a fixed, unknown linear objective on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$; the goal is to learn to optimize this objective without observing it. Sakaue recently obtained the optimal regret $O(\sqrt d)$ with a rando...

Anupam Gupta, Guru Guruganesh, Hong-Hao Lin et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

GeneICL: A Tabular Foundation Model for Bulk Transcriptomics

Gene expression is widely measured in biomedicine, yet clinical outcome prediction remains challenging due to high dimensionality, strong feature correlations, and limited labeled data. Large self-supervised transcriptomic foundation models often fail to outperform simple supervised baselines. Tabular foundation models...

Michael A. Bohl, Alexander Theus, David Wissel et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Probabilistic Counterfactual Inference for Discrete Outcomes in Gaussian-Process Causal Models

Counterfactual inference in Gaussian-process structural causal models (GP-SCMs) has been developed primarily for continuous endogenous variables, limiting applicability to causal graphs that contain discrete child nodes with continuous parents. We introduce a unified probabilistic framework for counterfactual inference...

J. Sinnott, Amir-Hossein Karimi, Mohammad Kohandel · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

A Systematic Study of Small Language Models on Abstract Reasoning Tasks

Endpoint accuracy on abstract-reasoning benchmarks does not reveal whether a language model has acquired a transferable rule or fit distribution-specific regularities. We study this distinction in small language models on the ARC-TGI benchmark, which organizes abstract grid transformations into controllable task famili...

Nur A. Zarin Nishat, Jens Lehmann, Andrei C. Aioanei et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Variance-Optimal Off-Policy Evaluation with Conjunct Effect Modeling

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) for contextual bandit policies becomes challenging when action-level importance weighting incurs excessive variance. Doubly robust (DR) estimation remains unbiased under common support but retains these high-variance action-level weights. A prior estimator, Off-policy evaluation with Conjunc...

Nicolò Felicioni, Michael Benigni, Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Principled Under Pressure: Post-Training Decides Whether LLMs Act on Their Own Moral Judgment

Language models increasingly act as agents. An agent that says an action is wrong and then takes it anyway is a different failure from one that does not know better, and evaluations of stated values cannot see it. We build a pre-registered panel of 248 scenarios across five kinds of pressure. Each scenario is posed twi...

Orion Reblitz-Richardson · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

MemFLoRA: Memory-Floor LoRA for CNN Adaptation at the Edge

On-device learning is necessary when the model encounters user-,sensor-, or environment-specific shifts after deployment. Although parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, particularly Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) variants, enable efficient adaptation at the edge, the limiting resource for Convolutional Neural Net...

Mehmet Emre Akbulut, Johannes Geier, Ulf Schlichtmann · 0 citations

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Microsoft Research Blog Oct 12, 2026

Simulating student learning for better AI tutoring

StudentSim is a research system for evaluating and improving AI tutoring tools before they are tested with learners. It models how individuals may engage with tutors, giving feedback to improve tutor performance across subjects like chess, writing, and mathematics. The post Simulating student learning for better AI tutoring appeared first on Microsoft Research.

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Oct 7, 2026

Discovering the value of humanistic inquiry

Students in MIT’s Concourse program delve deeply into the human condition, debate challenging questions, and learn to develop judgment about issues that can’t be quantified.

Microsoft Research Blog Oct 7, 2026

Agent Lightning v1.0: A 3,500-Line Lightweight Agentic RL Framework for Training Agents with Real Harnesses

Training AI agents with reinforcement learning can be challenging because their tools, context, and decision-making are managed by complex frameworks. Agent Lightning connects existing agents to RL training, making it easier to improve them without rebuilding them. The post Agent Lightning v1.0: A 3,500-Line Lightweight Agentic RL Framework for Training Agents with Real Harnesses appeared first on Microsoft Research.

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