Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2610.38774

Auditable Hierarchical Inference with Multimodal Evidence and Bayesian Active Inquiry

Abstract

Most multimodal classifiers assume that all useful evidence is available upfront, whereas clinical inquiry is sequential. We present a synthetic evaluation framework separating objective multimodal inference from active inquiry. An objective model maps synthetic tongue, bilateral multipressure pulse, and acoustic observations to eight syndrome families. A provenance-bearing Knowledge Core and training-only answer model support Bayesian narrowing over 33 fine terms using 25 typed questions, while seven safety questions remain outside the diagnostic posterior. Weak shared symptom factors limit fine-term influence on objective phenotypes, and an objective-only probe tests leakage. In a preregistered 600-case synthetic evaluation, objective family accuracy was 87.0%. Cost-sensitive expected information gain (cost-EIG) raised family accuracy to 95.5% and exact fine-term accuracy to 42.5%, versus 92.7% and 33.0% for an unoptimized fixed-order baseline. Selective family accuracy reached 96.9% at 95.3% coverage. However, cost-EIG asked more questions on average than fixed order (9.795 versus 9.352). Missing-audio routing retained 94.0% family accuracy, and a workflow invariant enforced abstention when all objective modalities were absent. Permuting fine-term answer likelihoods reduced family accuracy to 78.7%. Five of six frozen checks passed, but the question-efficiency hypothesis failed. Comparisons are descriptive because only aggregate, not paired case-level, outputs were retained. These results establish a reproducible synthetic workflow, not clinical diagnostic or treatment validity.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Yucheng Liu, Everett X. Wang. 2026-10-28. Auditable Hierarchical Inference with Multimodal Evidence and Bayesian Active Inquiry. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38774

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Dynamic Strategy Selection

We consider the problem of dynamically selecting among competing strategies using observable predictors. To mitigate estimation noise and excessive switching, we regularise the estimated policy with a switching cost, which may exceed actual transaction costs when these are too small to provide sufficient regularisation. Since switching costs make current choices affect future decisions, we formulate the problem using dynamic programming. The optimal policy is estimated using a reinforcement learning algorithm based on iterated regressions, making the procedure simple to implement. We apply the method to monthly rotation among momentum, value, profitability, and defensive U.S. equity factors over a sample of about 60 years. Using a parsimonious set of state variables, the estimated policy outperforms both the myopic dynamic policy and the best fixed factor in hindsight in out-of-sample evaluation. Under weak conditions, we show theoretically that the decision rule estimated from empirical data is asymptotically consistent for the unknown optimal decision rule. Simulation results illustrate the finite-sample relevance of these asymptotic results.

cs.LG↗

Mamba Hawkes Process for Event Sequence Modeling

Modeling asynchronous event sequences is crucial in numerous real-world applications such as healthcare monitoring, financial transaction analysis, and so on. Traditional temporal point processes, including Hawkes Processes, often fail to capture complex dependencies due to their parametric limitations. While neural approaches like RNNs and Transformers have improved flexibility, they struggle with computational inefficiency, and attention saturation. In this paper, we introduce the Mamba Hawkes Process (MHP), the first framework to integrate selective state space model (Mamba) with temporal point processes. MHP leverages time-varying state transitions and input-dependent gating to efficiently encode event history and capture long-term dependencies with linear complexity. Importantly, we provide theoretical guarantees showing that MHP generalizes both classical multi-exponential Hawkes processes and exponential-decay gated RNNs, underscoring its expressive power and theoretical soundness. To address the inherent constraints of pure state space models in handling heterogeneous event interactions, we further develop Adaptive Mamba Hawkes Process (A-MHP) that incorporates two novel mechanisms: a Time-Scaling Mechanism that adaptively weights time intervals based on event type and history, and a Dual-Channel State Transition that adaptively processes event content and temporal dynamics for more refined state updates. Extensive experiments on synthetic and realworld datasets demonstrate that MHP and A-MHP consistently outperform state-of-the-art baselines in event prediction tasks, particularly in long-sequence scenarios. Our work establishes a scalable and theoretically grounded paradigm for event sequence modeling, with practical implications for predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, and dynamic system analysis.

cs.LG↗

The Price of Failure Risk: Clipped Barrier Policy Gradients with Convex Regularization

In many control problems, actions consume a resource budget, such as a wear allowance, and the probability of exhausting it within a given horizon must stay below a tolerance. A simple, widely used approach is to augment the state with the remaining budget, subtract an interior barrier from the utility and penalize exhaustion, so that policy-gradient methods can be applied unchanged. We clip the combined one-step reward from below at a level m to keep the returns of exploratory policies finite. The clip level is a price of failure risk, since the clipped value decomposes exactly into the utility before failure, the cost of the interior margin and m times a geometric failure risk. Consequently, an approximately optimal policy maximizes utility net of margin cost among policies with no greater risk. Its risk exceeds that of any comparison policy by at most order 1/m and can be certified from its value or from validation data. Our main result proves exponential convergence of the population policy-gradient flow for every parameter regularizer that is convex along generalized geodesics and sufficiently strong relative to the price. This extends the mean-field analysis from relative entropy to weight decay and to finite networks. Relative entropy adds parameter noise and a pull toward a prior, whereas weight decay provides only the pull. Action regularization bounds changes in failure risk by the relative entropy to a reference policy. The bounds are evaluated on an exact maintenance benchmark, a fuel-tank controller, a solvable flow and a benchmark-suite task.

cs.LG↗