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A popular approach to apprenticeship learning (AL) is to formulate it as an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem. The MaxEnt-IRL algorithm successfully integrates the maximum entropy principle into IRL and unlike its predecessors, it resolves the ambiguity arising from the fact that a possibly large number of policies could match the expert's behavior. In this paper, we study an AL setting in which in addition to the expert's trajectories, a number of unsupervised trajectories is available. We introduce MESSI, a novel algorithm that combines MaxEnt-IRL with principles coming from semi-supervised learning. In particular, MESSI integrates the unsupervised data into the MaxEnt-IRL framework using a pairwise penalty on trajectories. Empirical results in a highway driving and grid-world problems indicate that MESSI is able to take advantage of the unsupervised trajectories and improve the performance of MaxEnt-IRL.
The rivalry between two football superstars Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi has always been a subject of extensive discussion. This study aimed to compare the level of consistency between the two players in scoring goals through 6 ways: right-footed kicks, left-footed kicks, penalty kicks, direct free kicks, long-range kicks, and headers. The data analyzed was the duration of time (minutes) each player took to score a goal in every match they played. The data was obtained from a football website called Transfermarkt.com. Competing Failure Modes (CFM) was used to measure the reliability of the two players in scoring goals based on those various ways. The results of CFM exploratory analysis showed that Ronaldo and Messi had the same level of consistency in scoring goals for more than 17 years of their professional football career. Both have been among most talented players in the modern football era with individual and team achievements that are far above other footballers around the world.
In some areas of computing, natural language processing and information science, progress is made by sharing datasets and challenging the community to design the best algorithm for an associated task. This article introduces a shared dataset of 1446 short texts, each of which describes a research quality score on the UK scale of 1* to 4*. This is a messy collection, with some texts not containing scores and others including invalid scores or strange formats. With this dataset there is also a description of what constitutes a valid score and a "gold standard" of the correct scores for these texts (including missing values). The challenge is to design a prompt for Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract the scores from these texts as accurately as possible. The format for the response should be a number and no other text so there are two aspects to the challenge: ensuring that the LLM returns only a number, and instructing it to deduce the correct number for the text. As part of this, the LLM prompt needs to explain when to return the missing value code, -1, instead of a number when the text does not clearly contain one. The article also provides an example of a simple prompt. The pu
Enterprise data exists in many forms, such as tables, text, maps, e-mail, and CAD models, that are access-controlled and hidden behind bespoke interfaces. Current agentic AI systems delegate the entire query workflow to a frontier LLM: a single model interprets the request, selects sources or tools, integrates retrieved evidence, judges completeness, and generates an answer, with few constraints, limited use of schemas, and text as the primary representation throughout. We argue that this is an ineffective abstraction for enterprise data. Reliable agentic AI should instead require structure: a constrained query interface over each source and a table-centric integration layer driven by a query processor. We introduce RUBICON, a system that embodies this vision. RUBICON is based on two observations. First, text-to-SQL fails on real enterprise data and must be dramatically subsetted to achieve reliable results. Second, data integration across disparate corporate datasets is best performed using tables as the core abstraction rather than text-centric LLM pipelines. We evaluate RUBICON on two benchmarks: our enterprise-focused RUBICON-Bench, against agentic baselines, and SemBench, agai
While multimodal integration significantly improves computer vision models, deploying them incurs prohibitive inference costs and requires scarce, perfectly paired datasets. Recent methods address this data bottleneck by synthesizing missing modalities via generative AI, yet they introduce a severe inefficiency: the Decode-Encode Loop. Specifically, information-rich generative latents are decoded into noisy raw signals, forcing the downstream classifier to waste capacity re-encoding them. To bypass this bottleneck, we propose Direct Latent Augmentation (DLA), utilizing undecoded generative latents directly as privileged information. Furthermore, to transfer this dense knowledge to a purely visual student, we introduce Multilayer Explicit Simulated Synesthesia (MESSy). Instead of enforcing rigid representation matching, which forces the student to distort its native visual features to accommodate complex multimodal topologies, MESSy uses a predictive objective to safely internalize these physical priors. Empirical results demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms raw data augmentation and traditional distillation. Ultimately, our approach yields highly accurate unimod
We present a large-scale empirical study isolating the contributions of the Derivative Regularization penalty (DREG). Across a fully-crossed factorial sweep of 960 experiments spanning 4 activations, 6 regularizers, 8 datasets, and 5 random seeds, we ask: when, where, and why does DREG work? Our results establish three principal findings. First, DREG achieves the highest overall and clean-regime accuracy among all regularizers evaluated (significantly so against the unregularized baseline, Weight Decay, and IGPen; Wilcoxon $p \leq 0.031$). It ranks second in noise robustness behind Spectral Normalization (SN) - the only two layer-wise regularizers in the study. Second, DREG is globally the best-performing regularizer under GELU, the default activation in modern transformer architectures, particularly on both messy vision and messy NLP benchmarks, suggesting direct applicability to frontier deep learning settings. Third, DREG's advantage over competing regularizers is most pronounced under data scarcity, consistent with its role as a geometric inductive bias that substitutes for the regularizing effect of data volume. Throughout, DREG is applied with a single fixed hyperparameter $λ
Complex patterns emerge across a wide range of biological systems. While such patterns often exhibit remarkable robustness, variation and irregularity exist at multiple scales and can carry important information about the underlying agent interactions driving collective dynamics. Many methods for quantifying biological patterns focus on large-scale, characteristic features (such as stripe width or spot number), but questions remain on how to characterize messy patterns. In the case of cellular patterns that emerge during development or regeneration, understanding where patterns are most susceptible to variability may help shed light on cell behavior and the tissue environment. Motivated by these challenges, we introduce methods based on topological data analysis to classify and quantify messy patterns arising from agent-based interactions, by extracting meaningful biological interpretations from persistence barcode summaries. To compute persistent homology, our methods rely on a sweeping-plane filtration which, in comparison to the Vietoris--Rips filtration, is more rarely applied to biological systems. We demonstrate how results from the sweeping-plane filtration can be interprete
Extracting a quad mesh from a grid preserving map is straightforward in theory, but typical inputs are not exactly grid preserving maps. Previous works can manage minor deviations from grid preserving maps, but without a clear specification of what is acceptable. This work clarifies how typical inputs differ from a grid preserving map, and shows how the differences with a grid preserving map can be reflected by a sequence of operations acting on a discrete structure. It opens research opportunities for the design of a robust quad extraction algorithm.
Active learning has the potential to be especially useful for messy, uncurated pools where datapoints vary in relevance to the target task. However, state-of-the-art approaches to this problem currently rely on using fixed, unsupervised representations of the pool, focusing on modifying the acquisition function instead. We show that this model setup can undermine their effectiveness at dealing with messy pools, as such representations can fail to capture important information relevant to the task. To address this, we propose using task-driven representations that are periodically updated during the active learning process using the previously collected labels. We introduce two specific strategies for learning these representations, one based on directly learning semi-supervised representations and the other based on supervised fine-tuning of an initial unsupervised representation. We find that both significantly improve empirical performance over using unsupervised or pretrained representations.
This article introduces the Data Retrieval Web Engine (also referred to as doctor web), a flexible and modular tool for extracting structured data from web pages using a simple query language. We discuss the engineering challenges addressed during its development, such as dynamic content handling and messy data extraction. Furthermore, we cover the steps for making the DR Web Engine public, highlighting its open source potential.
Today's AI assistants such as OpenClaw are designed to handle context effectively, making context learning an increasingly important capability for models. As these systems move beyond professional settings into everyday life, the nature of the contexts they must handle also shifts. Real-life contexts are often messy, fragmented, and deeply tied to personal and social experience, such as multi-party conversations, personal archives, and behavioral traces. Yet it remains unclear whether current frontier language models can reliably learn from such contexts and solve tasks grounded in them. To this end, we introduce CL-bench Life, a fully human-curated benchmark comprising 405 context-task pairs and 5,348 verification rubrics, covering common real-life scenarios. Solving tasks in CL-bench Life requires models to reason over complex, messy real-life contexts, calling for strong real-life context learning abilities that go far beyond those evaluated in existing benchmarks. We evaluate ten frontier LMs and find that real-life context learning remains highly challenging: even the best-performing model achieves only 19.3% task solving rate, while the average performance across models is o
This paper presents a Multi-Elevation Semantic Segmentation Image (MESSI) dataset comprising 2525 images taken by a drone flying over dense urban environments. MESSI is unique in two main features. First, it contains images from various altitudes, allowing us to investigate the effect of depth on semantic segmentation. Second, it includes images taken from several different urban regions (at different altitudes). This is important since the variety covers the visual richness captured by a drone's 3D flight, performing horizontal and vertical maneuvers. MESSI contains images annotated with location, orientation, and the camera's intrinsic parameters and can be used to train a deep neural network for semantic segmentation or other applications of interest (e.g., localization, navigation, and tracking). This paper describes the dataset and provides annotation details. It also explains how semantic segmentation was performed using several neural network models and shows several relevant statistics. MESSI will be published in the public domain to serve as an evaluation benchmark for semantic segmentation using images captured by a drone or similar vehicle flying over a dense urban envir
Understanding factors that influence software development velocity is crucial for engineering teams and organizations, yet empirical evidence at scale remains limited. A more robust understanding of the dynamics of cycle time may help practitioners avoid pitfalls in relying on velocity measures while evaluating software work. We analyze cycle time, a widely-used metric measuring time from ticket creation to completion, using a dataset of over 55,000 observations across 216 organizations. Through Bayesian hierarchical modeling that appropriately separates individual and organizational variation, we examine how coding time, task scoping, and collaboration patterns affect cycle time while characterizing its substantial variability across contexts. We find precise but modest associations between cycle time and factors including coding days per week, number of merged pull requests, and degree of collaboration. However, these effects are set against considerable unexplained variation both between and within individuals. Our findings suggest that while common workplace factors do influence cycle time in expected directions, any single observation provides limited signal about typical perf
This paper provides an overview of work, published since the opening of the archives of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the end of the twentieth century, regarding the Vatican confronting evolution in the nineteenth century. It argues that this work, considered in light of recent studies of scientific writings by Jesuit astronomers who in the seventeenth century were opposed to the ideas of Copernicus, points to interesting things yet to be learned regarding the Vatican's actions on heliocentrism. Concern for Scripture and for the fallible and consequential nature of science, together with the processes used by the Vatican in these confrontations, inevitably led to messy results in these well-known "religion and science" confrontations. Nevertheless, these confrontations suggest that what the Vatican was attempting to do in confronting evolution or heliocentrism is something that is needed in science, and something that will be done in the future, probably not by the Vatican, and probably in a fashion not less messy.
Machine learning (ML) applications that learn from data are increasingly used to automate impactful decisions. Unfortunately, these applications often fall short of adequately managing critical data and complying with upcoming regulations. A technical reason for the persistence of these issues is that the data pipelines in common ML libraries and cloud services lack fundamental declarative, data-centric abstractions. Recent research has shown how such abstractions enable techniques like provenance tracking and automatic inspection to help manage ML pipelines. Unfortunately, these approaches lack adoption in the real world because they require clean ML pipeline code written with declarative APIs, instead of the messy imperative Python code that data scientists typically write for data preparation. We argue that it is unrealistic to expect data scientists to change their established development practices. Instead, we propose to circumvent this "code abstraction gap" by leveraging the code generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Our idea is to rewrite messy data science code to a custom-tailored declarative pipeline abstraction, which we implement as a proof-of-concep
Large enterprise databases can be complex and messy, obscuring the data semantics needed for analytical tasks. We propose a semantic layer in-between the database and the user as a set of small and easy-to-interpret database views, effectively acting as a refined version of the schema. To discover these views, we introduce a multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) simulation where LLM agents collaborate to iteratively define and refine views with minimal input. Our approach paves the way for LLM-powered exploration of unwieldy databases.
Extensive previous research has focused on post-training knowledge editing (KE) for language models (LMs) to ensure that knowledge remains accurate and up-to-date. One desired property and open question in KE is to let edited LMs correctly handle ripple effects, where LM is expected to answer its logically related knowledge accurately. In this paper, we answer the question of why most KE methods still create messy ripple effects. We conduct extensive analysis and identify a salient indicator, GradSim, that effectively reveals when and why updated knowledge ripples in LMs. GradSim is computed by the cosine similarity between gradients of the original fact and its related knowledge. We observe a strong positive correlation between ripple effect performance and GradSim across different LMs, KE methods, and evaluation metrics. Further investigations into three counter-intuitive failure cases (Negation, Over-Ripple, Multi-Lingual) of ripple effects demonstrate that these failures are often associated with very low GradSim. This finding validates that GradSim is an effective indicator of when knowledge ripples in LMs.
The coordinate freedom of General Relativity makes it challenging to find mathematically rigorous and physically sound definitions for physical quantities such as the center of mass of an isolated gravitating system. We will argue that a similar phenomenon occurs in Newtonian Gravity once one ahistorically drops the restriction that one should only work in Cartesian coordinates when studying Newtonian Gravity. This will also shed light on the nature of the challenge of defining the center of mass in General Relativity. Relatedly, we will give explicit examples of asymptotically Euclidean relativistic initial data sets which do not satisfy the Regge--Teitelboim parity conditions often used to achieve a satisfactory definition of center of mass. These originate in our joint work with Jan Metzger. This will require appealing to Bartnik's asymptotic harmonic coordinates.
Environmental health studies are increasingly measuring endogenous omics data ($\boldsymbol{M}$) to study intermediary biological pathways by which an exogenous exposure ($\boldsymbol{A}$) affects a health outcome ($\boldsymbol{Y}$), given confounders ($\boldsymbol{C}$). Mediation analysis is frequently carried out to understand such mechanisms. If intermediary pathways are of interest, then there is likely literature establishing statistical and biological significance of the total effect, defined as the effect of $\boldsymbol{A}$ on $\boldsymbol{Y}$ given $\boldsymbol{C}$. For mediation models with continuous outcomes and mediators, we show that leveraging external summary-level information on the total effect improves estimation efficiency of the natural direct and indirect effects. Moreover, the efficiency gain depends on the asymptotic partial $R^2$ between the outcome ($\boldsymbol{Y}\mid\boldsymbol{M},\boldsymbol{A},\boldsymbol{C}$) and total effect ($\boldsymbol{Y}\mid\boldsymbol{A},\boldsymbol{C}$) models, with smaller (larger) values benefiting direct (indirect) effect estimation. We robustify our estimation procedure to incongenial external information by assuming the to
Football is a very result-driven industry, with goals being rarer than in most sports, so having further parameters to judge the performance of teams and individuals is key. Expected Goals (xG) allow further insight than just a scoreline. To tackle the need for further analysis in football, this paper uses machine learning applications that are developed and applied to Football Event data. From the concept, a Binary Classification problem is created whereby a probabilistic valuation is outputted using Logistic Regression and Gradient Boosting based approaches. The model successfully predicts xGs probability values for football players based on 15,575 shots. The proposed solution utilises StatsBomb as the data provider and an industry benchmark to tune the models in the right direction. The proposed ML solution for xG is further used to tackle the age-old cliche of: 'the ball has fallen to the wrong guy there'. The development of the model is used to adjust and gain more realistic values of expected goals than the general models show. To achieve this, this paper tackles Positional Adjusted xG, splitting the training data into Forward, Midfield, and Defence with the aim of providing