Paper List
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Nyxus: A Next Generation Image Feature Extraction Library for the Big Data and AI Era
This paper addresses the core pain point of efficiently extracting standardized, comparable features from massive (terabyte to petabyte-scale) biomedi...
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Topological Enhancement of Protein Kinetic Stability
This work addresses the long-standing puzzle of why knotted proteins exist by demonstrating that deep knots provide a functional advantage through enh...
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A Multi-Label Temporal Convolutional Framework for Transcription Factor Binding Characterization
This paper addresses the critical limitation of existing TF binding prediction methods that treat transcription factors as independent entities, faili...
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Social Distancing Equilibria in Games under Conventional SI Dynamics
This paper solves the core problem of proving the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibria in finite-duration SI epidemic games, showing they are a...
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Binding Free Energies without Alchemy
This paper addresses the core bottleneck of computational expense in Absolute Binding Free Energy calculations by eliminating the need for numerous al...
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SHREC: A Spectral Embedding-Based Approach for Ab-Initio Reconstruction of Helical Molecules
This paper addresses the core bottleneck in cryo-EM helical reconstruction: eliminating the dependency on accurate initial symmetry parameter estimati...
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Budget-Sensitive Discovery Scoring: A Formally Verified Framework for Evaluating AI-Guided Scientific Selection
This paper addresses the critical gap in evaluating AI-guided scientific selection strategies under realistic budget constraints, where existing metri...
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Probabilistic Joint and Individual Variation Explained (ProJIVE) for Data Integration
This paper addresses the core challenge of accurately decomposing shared (joint) and dataset-specific (individual) sources of variation in multi-modal...
Realizing Common Random Numbers: Event-Keyed Hashing for Causally Valid Stochastic Models
Institute for Disease Modeling, Gates Foundation | Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina | Institute for Disease Modeling, Gates Foundation
30秒速读
IN SHORT: This paper addresses the critical problem that standard stateful PRNG implementations in agent-based models violate causal validity by making random draws execution-path-dependent, thereby breaking the fundamental assumption of common random numbers needed for valid counterfactual comparisons.
核心创新
- Methodology Identifies and formalizes the fundamental mismatch between scientific causal structure in ABMs and program-level causal structure induced by stateful PRNGs through the lens of Structural Causal Models (SCMs)
- Methodology Introduces the concept of 'execution invariance' as a necessary property for causally valid ABM counterfactuals, requiring that exogenous noise terms remain stable across intervention scenarios
- Methodology Proposes event-keyed random number generation combining counter-based PRNGs (Philox/Threefry) with event identifiers to decouple random draws from simulation execution order
主要结论
- Standard stateful PRNG practices violate the execution invariance required for valid SCM-style interventions, as demonstrated through formal analysis of the structural causal model framework
- Event-keyed hashing with counter-based PRNGs restores the stable event-indexed exogenous structure assumed by SCMs, enabling proper counterfactual comparisons with variance reduction benefits
- The proposed approach allows ABMs to function as valid structural causal models under interventions, maintaining the critical property that interventions change only structural equations while holding exogenous noise terms fixed
摘要: Agent-based models (ABMs) are widely used to estimate causal treatment effects via paired counterfactual simulation. A standard variance reduction technique is common random numbers (CRNs), which couples replicates across intervention scenarios by sharing the same random inputs. In practice, CRNs are implemented by reusing the same base seed, but this relies on a critical assumption: that the same draw index corresponds to the same modeled event across scenarios. Stateful pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) violate this assumption whenever interventions alter the simulation's execution path, because any change in control flow shifts the draw index used for all downstream events. We argue that this execution-path-dependent draw indexing is not only a variance-reduction nuisance, but represents a fundamental mismatch between the scientific causal structure ABMs are intended to encode and the program-level causal structure induced by stateful PRNG implementations. Formalizing this through the lens of structural causal models (SCMs), we show that standard PRNG practices yield causally incoherent paired counterfactual comparisons even when the mechanistic specification is otherwise sound. We show that a remedy is to combine counter-based random number generators (e.g., Philox/Threefry) with event identifiers. This decouples random number generation from simulation execution order by making random draws explicit functions of the particular modeled event that called them, restoring the stable event-indexed exogenous structure assumed by SCMs.