Paper List
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MCP-AI: Protocol-Driven Intelligence Framework for Autonomous Reasoning in Healthcare
This paper addresses the critical gap in healthcare AI systems that lack contextual reasoning, long-term state management, and verifiable workflows by...
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Model Gateway: Model Management Platform for Model-Driven Drug Discovery
This paper addresses the critical bottleneck of fragmented, ad-hoc model management in pharmaceutical research by providing a centralized, scalable ML...
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Tree Thinking in the Genomic Era: Unifying Models Across Cells, Populations, and Species
This paper addresses the fragmentation of tree-based inference methods across biological scales by identifying shared algorithmic principles and stati...
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SSDLabeler: Realistic semi-synthetic data generation for multi-label artifact classification in EEG
This paper addresses the core challenge of training robust multi-label EEG artifact classifiers by overcoming the scarcity and limited diversity of ma...
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Decoding Selective Auditory Attention to Musical Elements in Ecologically Valid Music Listening
This paper addresses the core challenge of objectively quantifying listeners' selective attention to specific musical components (e.g., vocals, drums,...
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Physics-Guided Surrogate Modeling for Machine Learning–Driven DLD Design Optimization
This paper addresses the core bottleneck of translating microfluidic DLD devices from research prototypes to clinical applications by replacing weeks-...
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Mechanistic Interpretability of Antibody Language Models Using SAEs
This work addresses the core challenge of achieving both interpretability and controllable generation in domain-specific protein language models, spec...
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Fluctuating Environments Favor Extreme Dormancy Strategies and Penalize Intermediate Ones
This paper addresses the core challenge of determining how organisms should tune dormancy duration to match the temporal autocorrelation of their envi...
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.