arXiv subjects

Guanyu Hu

Publications and source records attributed to Guanyu Hu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

When Do Sports Leagues Stop Being Competitive? Bayesian Detection of Competitive-Balance Eras from Match-Level Data

Competitive balance shapes outcome uncertainty, fan interest, and league regulation, yet standard measures summarize realized standings and cannot separate structural ability differences from match-level randomness. We develop a Bayesian framework that infers structural competitive balance from longitudinal match outcomes. Team abilities are obtained by projecting Gaussian auxiliary variables onto a graph-fused l1 polytope whose radius measures total pairwise ability variation. The projection places positive probability on exact ties, so statistically indistinguishable teams form explicit rank tiers. The radius equals realized ability variation whenever the constraint binds, linking it to parity, detectability, and structural inequality. An adaptive finite-regime model lets competitive eras recur, emerge, and disappear while team hierarchies remain season specific. Simulations show accurate recovery of regimes, radii, abilities, and tiers. Applied to 25 English Premier League seasons, the model identifies a persistent shift to a more stratified league beginning in 2005/06, with 2010/11 the only later return to the compressed regime. It also shows that a close title race can coexist with wide league-wide separation and that head-to-head results can separate clubs level on points. The framework gives leagues a model-based measure of balance to inform debates on revenue sharing and financial regulation.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2026

Close Races and Similarity Bias: A Bayesian Analysis of the Ranked Ballots for the Ballon d'Or

The Ballon d'Or ranks players whose contributions have no common unit, so its results are often disputed. Regressions of award points describe associations but not how complete ballots arise or how likely a different winner would be. We propose a Bayesian mixture-of-experts model for partial rankings that learns nonlinear performance relationships, the number of voting styles and journalists' style memberships. A shared soft regression tree with style-specific leaf values lets styles evaluate the same season records differently on a common basis. Region-dependent mixing probabilities and journalist--nominee similarity terms separate geographic differences in voting styles from affinity within a style, and journalist- and rank-specific precisions capture remaining variation. We establish identification and consistency for the number of occupied styles under explicit conditions; simulations examine recovery, calibration and robustness to misspecification. Applied to all 176 published ballots from 2019 and 99 from 2024, the model compares award outcomes under changes in affinity and jury composition. For 2019, Messi's probability of winning with a new jury from the same countries rises from 0.49 to 0.76 when similarity terms are removed. For 2024, the direction of this change depends on whether affinities differ by region. Regional representation changes winner probabilities more than jury size.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Match Results: Bayesian Mediation of Ability, Performance, and Winning in Professional Tennis

Match results measure competitive ability, but they do not explain how ability is expressed during play. Match statistics offer a natural mediator, however performance is usually measured over the same match as the outcome: a full-match statistic uses events that help determine the winner, while a first-set statistic is earlier but rests on fewer service points and still contributes to the result. Comparing the two therefore mixes timing and precision. We develop a Bayesian mediation framework for this problem. Dynamic abilities on hard, clay, and grass courts are estimated from previous seasons only and are linked to both players' service performance, and a Bradley--Terry model relates ability and performance to the match result. A control mediator samples the first set's number of service points from the full match, separating the measurement window from the point count. In 3,820 men's matches, the hard-court mediated share rises from 0.52 with a first-set mediator to 0.95 with a full-match mediator; the point-count contrast accounts for 0.30 of this gap and the window contrast for 0.13. The pattern replicates on the women's tour. Simulations and sensitivity analyzes examine the decomposition and assumptions needed for a causal interpretation.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2026

Modeling Nonlinear Ability Trajectories and Learner Heterogeneity in Online Learning: A Bayesian Nonparametric Dynamic IRT Framework

Online learning has amplified the need to understand how student engagement patterns influence learning outcomes, particularly given the flexibility of technology-mediated environments. To address this, we propose a Bayesian nonparametric dynamic item response theory (IRT) framework that tracks within-individual ability trajectories across instructional units. The proposed model integrates B-spline basis expansions to capture nonlinear effects of engagement behaviors on ability drift, alongside a Mixture-of-Finite-Mixtures (MFM) prior to automatically determine the number of latent learner clusters. This framework overcomes three limitations in the existing literature: (1) rigid linearity assumptions in engagement-ability relationships, (2) dependence on pre-specified cluster counts, and (3) the inability to track longitudinal ability dynamics. We apply the model to longitudinal data from 198 undergraduates completing a 9-chapter introductory statistics course on CourseKata. The model automatically identified four distinct learner profiles: struggling-declining (11\%), low-stable (23\%), mainstream-stable (55\%), and high-improving (12\%). Results indicate that ability trajectories remained remarkably stable across chapters, and engagement quantity metrics did not significantly predict ability drift. These findings suggest that in introductory online statistics education, academic ability primarily reflects a stable pre-existing characteristic rather than a dynamically malleable course outcome. Ultimately, this framework offers a flexible tool for learner profiling to inform adaptive instructional design.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2026

Learning Collapsed Patterns in Compositional Data: A Bayesian Heterogeneous Relative-Shift Approach

Relative-shift regression provides a principled framework for modeling compositional covariates by quantifying how the response changes when mass is reallocated from one component to another. Yet many emerging compositional data problems extend beyond this classical setting, involving high-dimensional predictors and regression effects that vary across latent subpopulations. This complexity poses a dual challenge unmet by existing methods: recovering latent cluster structure while simultaneously achieving dimension reduction within each cluster. We propose a Bayesian heterogeneous relative-shift regression model that jointly learns latent clusters and parsimonious effect structures. Methodologically, we combine a projection-based shrinkage prior on identifiable contrasts, which induces exact coefficient ties within mixture components, with a mixture of finite mixtures prior that infers the number of clusters. Computationally, we develop a scalable hybrid MCMC algorithm that embeds a deterministic surrogate collapse operator within NUTS. Theoretically, we establish posterior consistency for both the latent partition and cluster-specific effect structures. Simulations confirm accurate recovery and strong predictive performance, and applications to cross-country macroeconomic data and spatial transcriptomics demonstrate the method's interpretability and practical utility.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2026

From Affect to Complex Behavior: Advancing Multimodal Human-Centered AI at the 10th ABAW Workshop & Competition

The 10th Affective & Behavior Analysis in-the-Wild (ABAW) Workshop and Competition, held at CVPR 2026, continues to advance research on modelling, analysis, understanding of human affect and behavior in real-world, unconstrained environments. The workshop maintains its dual structure, comprising both a competition and a paper track. The ABAW Competition introduces a diverse set of challenges targeting key aspects of affective and behavioral understanding, including continuous affect (valence-arousal) estimation, discrete affect (expression and action unit) recognition, as well as more complex behavior analysis tasks, such as emotional mimicry intensity estimation, ambivalence/hesitancy recognition and fine-grained violence detection. These challenges are built upon large-scale in-the-wild datasets, providing comprehensive benchmarks for state-of-the-art approaches. In parallel, the paper track presents a wide range of contributions spanning pose, motion & behavior estimation, affect modelling & multimodal learning, benchmarks, datasets & evaluation protocols, fairness, robustness & deployment. Overall, the 10th ABAW Workshop and Competition continues to serve as a key platform for benchmarking, collaboration and innovation, shaping the development of next-generation multimodal, human-centered AI systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Linking COPD Prevalence with Income Distribution: A Spatial Heterogeneous Compositional Regression via Geographically Weighted Penalized Approach

Income inequality is a major contributor to health disparities, yet its effects often vary by geography and are commonly represented as compositional distributions (e.g., proportions of households across income brackets). Existing spatial regression methods struggle in this setting: they typically assume smooth spatial variation, cannot accommodate abrupt spatial heterogeneity, and lack principled treatment of compositional covariates. We propose a geographically weighted penalized compositional regression model that addresses these challenges simultaneously. Our method adopts a pairwise fusion penalty that enables detection of both contiguous and noncontiguous regional clusters with shared regression effects, thereby relaxing strong assumptions of spatial smoothness and geographic contiguity. This allows regions with similar underlying socioeconomic structures to be identified even when they are not geographically adjacent. By incorporating nonconvex penalties, such as the minimax concave penalty (MCP), the approach achieves improved estimation accuracy, interpretability, and scalability in high-dimensional spatial settings. We illustrate the method through an analysis linking U.S. income composition to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) prevalence, revealing spatially heterogeneous associations that are obscured by conventional models. The proposed framework provides a flexible and robust tool for spatial data analysis involving compositional predictors and region-specific heterogeneity.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2026

BaySC: Uncovering Tissue Architecture in Spatial Multi-Omics via Probabilistic Spatial Clustering

Spatial domain identification requires jointly modeling molecular signatures and physical coordinates, yet current tools frequently over-smooth biological boundaries, require user-specified cluster numbers, and lack principled multimodal integration. We introduce BaySC, an integrative Bayesian spatial clustering framework for spatial domain identification. BaySC inherently learns the true number of spatial domains from the data by employing a Mixture of Finite Mixtures (MFM) prior. Tissue topology is modeled via a Markov Random Field (MRF) applied to discrete cellular assignments, a strategy that enforces local spatial coherence without distorting the underlying gene expression features. This enables BaySC to accurately map contiguous tissue layers as well as geographically scattered, transcriptionally identical cell populations. Furthermore, BaySC handles spatial multi-omics data through a weighted log-likelihood fusion mechanism executed via Gibbs sampling. This approach assigns interpretable weights to each modality, allowing users to quantify the biological relevance of different data layers to the final tissue map. Validated across ten single-modal spatial transcriptomics and two spatial multi-omics datasets, BaySC yields highly interpretable probabilistic outputs. It demonstrates competitive accuracy on standard clustering metrics and consistently outperforms existing tools in preserving spatial topography, as measured by spatially-aware Adjusted Rand Index (spARI).

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arXiv2026

Mixture of Finite Mixtures Model for Basket Trial

With the recent paradigm shift from cytotoxic drugs to new generation of target therapy and immuno-oncology therapy during oncology drug developments, patients with various cancer (sub)types may be eligible to participate in a basket trial if they have the same molecular target. Bayesian hierarchical modeling (BHM) are widely used in basket trial data analysis, where they adaptively borrow information among different cohorts (subtypes) rather than fully pool the data together or doing stratified analysis based on each cohort. Those approaches, however, may have the risk of over shrinkage estimation because of the invalidated exchangeable assumption. We propose a two-step procedure to find the balance between pooled and stratified analysis. In the first step, we treat it as a clustering problem by grouping cohorts into clusters that share the similar treatment effect. In the second step, we use shrinkage estimator from BHM to estimate treatment effects for cohorts within each cluster under exchangeable assumption. For clustering part, we adapt the mixture of finite mixtures (MFM) approach to have consistent estimate of the number of clusters. We investigate the performance of our proposed method in simulation studies and apply this method to Vemurafenib basket trial data analysis.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2026

The Load Management Paradox: Correcting the Healthy-Worker Survivor Effect in NBA Injury Modeling

In professional sports analytics, evaluating the relationship between accumulated workload and injury risk is a central objective. However, naive survival models applied to NBA game-log data consistently yield a paradox: players who recently logged heavy minutes appear less likely to sustain an injury. We demonstrate that this counterintuitive result is an artifact of the healthy-worker survivor effect, wherein conditioning on game participation induces severe collider bias driven by unobserved latent fitness. To address this structural confounding, we develop a Marginal Structural Piecewise Exponential Model (MS-PEM) that unifies inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) with flexible piecewise-exponential additive models and weighted cumulative exposure (WCE). A simulation study confirms that this selection mechanism is mathematically sufficient to entirely reverse the sign of the true association between workload and injury. Applying the MS-PEM to 78,594 player-game observations across three NBA seasons (encompassing 771 players and 2,439 injury events), we find that adjusting for observed selection reliably shifts the hazard back toward the underlying physiological relationship. While the exact magnitude of the correction is sensitive to outcome-model regularization (attenuating the paradoxical weight function by 1% to 2% under conservative cross-validation and up to 63% to 78% under lighter penalization), the positive direction of the causal correction is highly robust across multiple propensity specifications and doubly robust checks. Ultimately, these results provide a methodological template for bias-aware sports injury modeling, while cautioning that models relying strictly on observational game logs will systematically underestimate the true risk of heavy workloads without richer physiological data for full causal identification.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2026

A Closed-Form Solution for Debiasing Vision-Language Models with Utility Guarantees Across Modalities and Tasks

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse downstream tasks, recent studies have shown that they can inherit social biases from the training data and further propagate them into downstream applications. To address this issue, various debiasing approaches have been proposed, yet most of them aim to improve fairness without having a theoretical guarantee that the utility of the model is preserved. In this paper, we introduce a debiasing method that yields a \textbf{closed-form} solution in the cross-modal space, achieving Pareto-optimal fairness with \textbf{bounded utility losses}. Our method is \textbf{training-free}, requires \textbf{no annotated data}, and can jointly debias both visual and textual modalities across downstream tasks. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods in debiasing VLMs across diverse fairness metrics and datasets for both group and \textbf{intersectional} fairness in downstream tasks such as zero-shot image classification, text-to-image retrieval, and text-to-image generation while preserving task performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Fair Domain Generalization: An Information-Theoretic View

Domain generalization (DG) and algorithmic fairness are two critical challenges in machine learning. However, most DG methods focus only on minimizing expected risk in the unseen target domain without considering algorithmic fairness. Conversely, fairness methods typically do not account for domain shifts, so the fairness achieved during training may not generalize to unseen test domains. In this work, we bridge these gaps by studying the problem of Fair Domain Generalization (FairDG), which aims to minimize both expected risk and fairness violations in unseen target domains. We derive novel mutual information-based upper bounds for expected risk and fairness violations in multi-class classification tasks with multi-group sensitive attributes. These bounds provide key insights for algorithm design from an information-theoretic perspective. Guided by these insights, we introduce PAFDG (Pareto-Optimal Fairness for Domain Generalization), a practical framework that solves the FairDG problem and models the utility-fairness trade-off through Pareto optimization. Experiments on real-world vision and language datasets show that PAFDG achieves superior utility-fairness trade-offs compared to existing methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Learning Heterogeneous Ordinal Graphical Models via Bayesian Nonparametric Clustering

Graphical models are powerful tools for capturing conditional dependence structures in complex systems but remain underexplored in analyzing ordinal data, especially in sports analytics. Ordinal variables, such as team rankings, player performance ratings, and survey responses, are pervasive in sports data but present unique challenges, particularly when accounting for heterogeneous subgroups, such as teams with varying styles or players with distinct roles. Existing methods, including probit graphical models, struggle with modeling heterogeneity and selecting the number of subgroups effectively. We propose a novel nonparametric Bayesian framework using the Mixture of Finite Mixtures (MFM) approach to address these challenges. Our method allows for flexible subgroup discovery and models each subgroup with a probit graphical model, simultaneously estimating the number of clusters and their configurations. We develop an efficient Gibbs sampling algorithm for inference, enabling robust estimation of cluster-specific structures and parameters. This framework is particularly suited to sports analytics, uncovering latent patterns in player performance metrics. Our work bridges critical gaps in modeling ordinal data and provides a foundation for advanced decision-making in sports performance and strategy.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2025

CausalAffect: Causal Discovery for Facial Affective Understanding

Understanding human affect from facial behavior requires not only accurate recognition but also structured reasoning over the latent dependencies that drive muscle activations and their expressive outcomes. Although Action Units (AUs) have long served as the foundation of affective computing, existing approaches rarely address how to infer psychologically plausible causal relations between AUs and expressions directly from data. We propose CausalAffect, the first framework for causal graph discovery in facial affect analysis. CausalAffect models AU-AU and AU-Expression dependencies through a two-level polarity and direction aware causal hierarchy that integrates population-level regularities with sample-adaptive structures. A feature-level counterfactual intervention mechanism further enforces true causal effects while suppressing spurious correlations. Crucially, our approach requires neither jointly annotated datasets nor handcrafted causal priors, yet it recovers causal structures consistent with established psychological theories while revealing novel inhibitory and previously uncharacterized dependencies. Extensive experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate that CausalAffect advances the state of the art in both AU detection and expression recognition, establishing a principled connection between causal discovery and interpretable facial behavior. All trained models and source code will be released upon acceptance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

FairMT: Fairness for Heterogeneous Multi-Task Learning

Fairness in machine learning has been extensively studied in single-task settings, while fair multi-task learning (MTL), especially with heterogeneous tasks (classification, detection, regression) and partially missing labels, remains largely unexplored. Existing fairness methods are predominantly classification-oriented and fail to extend to continuous outputs, making a unified fairness objective difficult to formulate. Further, existing MTL optimization is structurally misaligned with fairness: constraining only the shared representation, allowing task heads to absorb bias and leading to uncontrolled task-specific disparities. Finally, most work treats fairness as a zero-sum trade-off with utility, enforcing symmetric constraints that achieve parity by degrading well-served groups. We introduce FairMT, a unified fairness-aware MTL framework that accommodates all three task types under incomplete supervision. At its core is an Asymmetric Heterogeneous Fairness Constraint Aggregation mechanism, which consolidates task-dependent asymmetric violations into a unified fairness constraint. Utility and fairness are jointly optimized via a primal--dual formulation, while a head-aware multi-objective optimization proxy provides a tractable descent geometry that explicitly accounts for head-induced anisotropy. Across three homogeneous and heterogeneous MTL benchmarks encompassing diverse modalities and supervision regimes, FairMT consistently achieves substantial fairness gains while maintaining superior task utility. Code will be released upon paper acceptance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

How Much Does Home Field Advantage Matter in Soccer Games? A Causal Inference Approach for English Premier League Analysis

In many sports, it is commonly believed that the home team has an advantage over the visiting team, known as the home field advantage. Yet its causal effect on team performance is largely unknown. In this paper, we propose a novel causal inference approach to study the causal effect of home field advantage in English Premier League. We develop a hierarchical causal model and show that both league level and team level causal effects are identifiable and can be conveniently estimated. We further develop an inference procedure for the proposed estimators and demonstrate its excellent numerical performance via simulation studies. We implement our method on the 2020-21 English Premier League data and assess the causal effect of home advantage on eleven summary statistics that measure the offensive and defensive performance and referee-assessed disciplinary outcomes. We find that the home field advantage resides more heavily in offensive statistics than it does in defensive or referee statistics. We also find evidence that teams that had lower rankings retain a higher home field advantage.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2025

Grounding Emotion Recognition with Visual Prototypes: VEGA -- Revisiting CLIP in MERC

Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations remains a challenging task due to the complex interplay of textual, acoustic and visual signals. While recent models have improved performance via advanced fusion strategies, they often lack psychologically meaningful priors to guide multimodal alignment. In this paper, we revisit the use of CLIP and propose a novel Visual Emotion Guided Anchoring (VEGA) mechanism that introduces class-level visual semantics into the fusion and classification process. Distinct from prior work that primarily utilizes CLIP's textual encoder, our approach leverages its image encoder to construct emotion-specific visual anchors based on facial exemplars. These anchors guide unimodal and multimodal features toward a perceptually grounded and psychologically aligned representation space, drawing inspiration from cognitive theories (prototypical emotion categories and multisensory integration). A stochastic anchor sampling strategy further enhances robustness by balancing semantic stability and intra-class diversity. Integrated into a dual-branch architecture with self-distillation, our VEGA-augmented model achieves sota performance on IEMOCAP and MELD. Code is available at: https://github.com/dkollias/VEGA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Time-Varying Home Field Advantage in Football: Learning from a Non-Stationary Causal Process

In sports analytics, home field advantage is a robust phenomenon where the home team wins more games than the away team. However, discovering the causal factors behind home field advantage presents unique challenges due to the non-stationary, time-varying environment of sports matches. In response, we propose a novel causal discovery method, DYnamic Non-stAtionary local M-estimatOrs (DYNAMO), to learn the time-varying causal structures of home field advantage. DYNAMO offers flexibility by integrating various loss functions, making it practical for learning linear and non-linear causal structures from a general class of non-stationary causal processes. By leveraging local information, we provide theoretical guarantees for the identifiability and estimation consistency of non-stationary causal structures without imposing additional assumptions. Simulation studies validate the efficacy of DYNAMO in recovering time-varying causal structures. We apply our method to high-resolution event data from the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 English Premier League seasons, during which the former season had no audience presence. Our results reveal intriguing, time-varying, team-specific field advantages influenced by referee bias, which differ significantly with and without crowd support. Furthermore, the time-varying causal structures learned by our method improve goal prediction accuracy compared to existing methods.

stat.AP↗