Related papers: How Many Mechanisms? Measuring Parsimony in Risky …
One way to make decisions under uncertainty is to select an optimal option from a possible range of options, by maximizing the expected utilities derived from a probability model. However, under severe uncertainty, identifying precise…
Selective classification is a powerful tool for automated decision-making in high-risk scenarios, allowing classifiers to act only when confident and abstain when uncertainty is high. Given a target accuracy, our goal is to minimize…
The Rashomon effect presents a significant challenge in model selection. It occurs when multiple models achieve similar performance on a dataset but produce different predictions, resulting in predictive multiplicity. This is especially…
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at text summarization, a task that requires models to select content based on its importance. However, the exact notion of salience that LLMs have internalized remains unclear. To bridge this gap, we…
Models with fewer parameters are often easier to interpret and more robust. Parsimony can be achieved through optimizing objectives like the AIC or BIC, which are functions of the the number of free parameters in the model. Optimizing this…
The random utility model (RUM, McFadden and Richter, 1990) has been the standard tool to describe the behavior of a population of decision makers. RUM assumes that decision makers behave as if they maximize a rational preference over a…
We model the behavioral biases of human decision-making in securing interdependent systems and show that such behavioral decision-making leads to a suboptimal pattern of resource allocation compared to non-behavioral (rational)…
In dynamic programming and reinforcement learning, the policy for the sequential decision making of an agent in a stochastic environment is usually determined by expressing the goal as a scalar reward function and seeking a policy that…
Computational models of visual attention in artificial intelligence and robotics have been inspired by the concept of a saliency map. These models account for the mutual information between the (current) visual information and its estimated…
As artificial agents become increasingly capable, what internal structure is *necessary* for an agent to act competently under uncertainty? Classical results show that optimal control can be *implemented* using belief states or world…
This study introduces an agent-based model to study how regret, uncertainty, and social norms interact to shape vaccination behavior during epidemics. The model integrates three behavioral mechanisms, anticipated regret, evolving norms, and…
Algorithmic recommendation based on noisy preference measurement is prevalent in recommendation systems. This paper discusses the consequences of such recommendation on market concentration and inequality. Binary types denoting a…
Selective rationalization improves neural network interpretability by identifying a small subset of input features -- the rationale -- that best explains or supports the prediction. A typical rationalization criterion, i.e. maximum mutual…
Probabilistic control design is founded on the principle that a rational agent attempts to match modelled with an arbitrary desired closed-loop system trajectory density. The framework was originally proposed as a tractable alternative to…
In many areas of engineering and sciences, decision rules and control strategies are usually designed based on nominal values of relevant system parameters. To ensure that a control strategy or decision rule will work properly when the…
A mixture of multivariate contaminated normal distributions is developed for model-based clustering. In addition to the parameters of the classical normal mixture, our contaminated mixture has, for each cluster, a parameter controlling the…
In this paper, we take a statistical decision-theoretic viewpoint on social choice, putting a focus on the decision to be made on behalf of a system of agents. In our framework, we are given a statistical ranking model, a decision space,…
As machine learning is increasingly used to help make decisions, there is a demand for these decisions to be explainable. Arguably, the most explainable machine learning models use decision rules. This paper focuses on decision sets, a type…
In counting experiments, one can set an upper limit on the rate of a Poisson process based on a count of the number of events observed due to the process. In some experiments, one makes several counts of the number of events, using…
Theories can be represented as statistical models for empirical testing. There is a vast literature on model selection and multimodel inference that focuses on how to assess which statistical model, and therefore which theory, best fits the…