• To Wait or Not to Wait? A Trade-off Between Population Externality and Signal Quality (Lan-Yi Liu, National Taiwan University)

    Emmy Noether Room, Estella 1021, Pomona College, 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    Abstract: Transparency is vital for efficiency in social systems, yet individuals with critical information often strategically postpone disclosure, even when required, to benefit themselves. To study this behavior, we introduce a multi-stage Chinese restaurant game with incomplete information that features system-recommended action rules and varying levels of player foresight. In our model, players initially receive […]

  • A Signal Separation View of Classification (Ryan O’Dowd, CGU)

    Estella 1021 (Emmy Noether Room), Pomona College Claremont, CA, United States

    Abstract: The problem of classification in machine learning has often been approached in terms of function approximation. In this talk, we propose an alternative approach for classification in arbitrary compact metric spaces which, in theory, yields both the number of classes, and a perfect classification using a minimal number of queried labels. Our approach uses […]

  • Explainability and Analysis of Variance (Zijun Gao, USC)

    Emmy Noether Room, Estella 1021, Pomona College, 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    Abstract: Existing tools for explaining complex models and systems are associational rather than causal and do not provide mechanistic understanding. We propose a new notion called counterfactual explainability for causal attribution that is motivated by the concept of genetic heritability in twin studies. Counterfactual explainability extends methods for global sensitivity analysis (including the functional analysis […]

  • Structure-Preserving Discretizations for Fokker–Planck Equations via the Energy Dissipation Law (Satish Chandran, UCR)

    Emmy Noether Room, Estella 1021, Pomona College, 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    Abstract: We present a new approach for deriving structure-preserving numerical discretizations of Fokker-Planck equations by establishing a connection between the Fokker-Planck equation and its semi-discrete master equation at the level of the energy-dissipation law. We determine the transition rate in the master equation via the detailed balance condition and the spatial discretization of the continuous […]

  • An Odd Estimator for Shapley Values (Teal Witter, CMC)

    Emmy Noether Room, Estella 1021, Pomona College, 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    Abstract: The Shapley value is a ubiquitous framework for attribution in machine learning, encompassing feature importance, data valuation, and causal inference. However, its exact computation is generally intractable, necessitating efficient approximation methods. While the most effective and popular estimators leverage the paired sampling heuristic to reduce estimation error, the theoretical mechanism driving this improvement has […]