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Related papers: Misspecified Beliefs about Time Lags

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Explaining predictions based on multivariate time series data carries the additional difficulty of handling not only multiple features, but also time dependencies. It matters not only what happened, but also when, and the same feature could…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Joseph Enguehard

We show that forms of Bayesian and MDL inference that are often applied to classification problems can be *inconsistent*. This means there exists a learning problem such that for all amounts of data the generalization errors of the MDL…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-07-16 Peter Grunwald , John Langford

As Large Language Model (LLM) agents become more widespread, associated misalignment risks increase. While prior research has studied agents' ability to produce harmful outputs or follow malicious instructions, it remains unclear how likely…

Throughout the cognitive-science literature, there is widespread agreement that decision-making agents operating in the real world do so under limited information-processing capabilities and without access to unbounded cognitive or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Dilip Arumugam , Mark K. Ho , Noah D. Goodman , Benjamin Van Roy

Beliefs inform the behavior of forward-thinking agents in complex environments. Recently, sequential Bayesian inference has emerged as a mechanism to study belief formation among agents adapting to dynamical conditions. However, we lack…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2023-11-08 Jordan T Kemp , Max-Olivier Hongler , Olivier Gallay

In statistical inference, it is rarely realistic that the hypothesized statistical model is well-specified, and consequently it is important to understand the effects of misspecification on inferential procedures. When the hypothesized…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-01 Beomjo Park , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Larry Wasserman

Time series data that are not measured at regular intervals are commonly discretized as a preprocessing step. For example, data about customer arrival times might be simplified by summing the number of arrivals within hourly intervals,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-09 Peter Schulam , Suchi Saria

Dynamic decision-making under model uncertainty is central to many economic environments, yet existing bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms rely on the assumption of correct model specification. This paper studies the behavior and…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-20 Xinyu Dai , Daniel Chen , Yian Qian

Many psychological experiments have subjects repeat a task to gain the statistical precision required to test quantitative theories of psychological performance. In such experiments, time-on-task can have sizable effects on performance,…

Applications · Statistics 2021-11-05 David Gunawan , Guy E. Hawkins , Robert Kohn , Minh-Ngoc Tran , Scott D. Brown

Human preferences in RLHF are typically modeled as a function of the human's reward function or corresponding optimal state-action values. In this work, we propose that human beliefs about the capabilities of the agent being trained also…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Sylee Dandekar , Shripad Deshmukh , Frank Chiu , W. Bradley Knox , Scott Niekum

Using theory and experiments, this paper shows that the difficulty of making tradeoffs offers a parsimonious explanation for a wide range of behavioral phenomena. We develop a model of imprecise comparisons applicable to multiattribute,…

General Economics · Economics 2026-04-01 Cassidy Shubatt , Jeffrey Yang

Standard models of multi-agent modal logic do not capture the fact that information is often ambiguous, and may be interpreted in different ways by different agents. We propose a framework that can model this, and consider different…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-03-06 Joseph Y. Halpern , Willemien Kets

Under non-exponential discounting, we develop a dynamic theory for stopping problems in continuous time. Our framework covers discount functions that induce decreasing impatience. Due to the inherent time inconsistency, we look for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-03-13 Yu-Jui Huang , Adrien Nguyen-Huu

A researcher observes a finite sequence of choices made by multiple agents in a binary-state environment. Agents maximize expected utilities that depend on their chosen alternative and the unknown underlying state. Agents learn about the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-05-11 Rahul Deb , Ludovic Renou

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings where good decisions require forming beliefs over the probability of unknown outcomes. However, it is unclear whether LLMs act as if they hold coherent beliefs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Khurram Yamin , Jingjing Tang , Santiago Cortes-Gomez , Amit Sharma , Eric Horvitz , Bryan Wilder

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed on long-horizon tasks in partially observable environments, where they must act while inferring and tracking a complex environment state over many steps. This leads to two challenges:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Joykirat Singh , Zaid Khan , Archiki Prasad , Justin Chih-Yao Chen , Akshay Nambi , Hyunji Lee , Elias Stengel-Eskin , Mohit Bansal

When inferring the causal effect of one variable on another from correlational data, a common practice by professional researchers as well as lay decision makers is to control for some set of exogenous confounding variables. Choosing an…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-05-31 Ran Spiegler

Language models (LMs) are increasingly used to build agents that can act autonomously to achieve goals. During this automatic process, agents need to take a series of actions, some of which might lead to severe consequences if incorrect…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Cheng-Kuang Wu , Zhi Rui Tam , Chieh-Yen Lin , Yun-Nung Chen , Hung-yi Lee

Agents' judgment depends on perception and previous knowledge. Assuming that previous knowledge depends on perception, we can say that judgment depends on perception. So, if judgment depends on perception, can agents judge that they have…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2012-02-21 Ahmed M. Mahran

Credit assignment in reinforcement learning is the problem of measuring an action's influence on future rewards. In particular, this requires separating skill from luck, i.e. disentangling the effect of an action on rewards from that of…