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By compressing diverse narratives, LLMs go beyond memorization, achieving intelligence by capturing generalizable causal relationships. However, they suffer from local 'representation gaps' due to insufficient training data diversity, limiting their real-world utility, especially in tasks requiring strict alignment to rules. Traditional alignment methods relying on heavy human annotations are inefficient and unscalable. Recent self-alignment techniques also fall short, as they often depend on self-selection based prompting and memorization-based learning. To address these issues, we introduce Iterative Graph Alignment (IGA), an annotation-free rule-based alignment algorithm. A teacher model (VLM) employs Iterative Graph Prompting (IGP) to create logical graphs and reference answers. The student model (LLM) identifies local knowledge gaps by attempting to align its responses with these references, collaborating with helper models to generate diverse answers. These aligned responses are then used for iterative supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Our evaluations across five rule-based scenarios demonstrate IGP's effectiveness, with a 73.12\% alignment improvement in Claude Sonnet 3.5, and Llama3-8B-Instruct achieving an 86.20\% improvement, outperforming Claude Sonnet 3.5 in rule-based alignment., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures

In star clusters, close stellar encounters can strongly impact the architecture of a planetary system or even destroy it. We present a systematic study on the effects of stellar flybys on two-planet systems. When such a system experiences flybys, one or both planets can be ejected, forming free-floating planets (FFPs), captured planets (CPs) around the flyby star, and free-floating binary planets (BPs); the remaining single-surviving-planets (SSPs) can have their orbital radii and eccentricities greatly changed. Through numerical experiments, we calculate the formation fractions (or branching ratios) of FFPs, SSPs, CPs and BPs as a function of the pericenter distance of the flyby, and use them to derive analytical expressions for the formation rates of FFPs, SSPs, CPs and BPs in general cluster environments. We find that the production rates of FFPs and SSPs are similar (for initial planet semi-major axis ratio $a_1/a_2=0.6-0.8$), while the rate for CPs is a few times smaller. The formation fraction of BPs depends strongly on $a_1/a_2$ and on the planet masses. For Jupiter-mass planets, the formation fraction of BPs is always less than $1\%$ (for $a_1/a_2=0.8$) and typically much smaller ($\lesssim 0.2\%$ for $a_1/a_2\lesssim 0.7$). The fraction remains less than $1\%$ when considering $4M_{\rm J}$ planets. Overall, when averaging over all flybys, the production rate of BPs is less than $0.1\%$ of that for FFPs. We also derive the velocity distribution of FFPs produced by stellar flybys, and the orbital parameter distributions of SSPs, CPs and BPs. These results can be used in future studies of exotic planets (including FFPs) and planetary systems., Comment: 21 pages, 13+9 figures, accepted to ApJ

In this article we consider the development of unbiased estimators of the Hessian, of the log-likelihood function with respect to parameters, for partially observed diffusion processes. These processes arise in numerous applications, where such diffusions require derivative information, either through the Jacobian or Hessian matrix. As time-discretizations of diffusions induce a bias, we provide an unbiased estimator of the Hessian. This is based on using Girsanov's Theorem and randomization schemes developed through Mcleish [2011] and Rhee & Glynn [2015]. We demonstrate our developed estimator of the Hessian is unbiased, and one of finite variance. We numerically test and verify this by comparing the methodology here to that of a newly proposed particle filtering methodology. We test this on a range of diffusion models, which include different Ornstein--Uhlenbeck processes and the Fitzhugh--Nagumo model, arising in neuroscience.

This position paper summarizes a recently developed research program focused on inference in the context of data centric science and engineering applications, and forecasts its trajectory forward over the next decade. Often one endeavours in this context to learn complex systems in order to make more informed predictions and high stakes decisions under uncertainty. Some key challenges which must be met in this context are robustness, generalizability, and interpretability. The Bayesian framework addresses these three challenges elegantly, while bringing with it a fourth, undesirable feature: it is typically far more expensive than its deterministic counterparts. In the 21st century, and increasingly over the past decade, a growing number of methods have emerged which allow one to leverage cheap low-fidelity models in order to precondition algorithms for performing inference with more expensive models and make Bayesian inference tractable in the context of high-dimensional and expensive models. Notable examples are multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC), multi-index Monte Carlo (MIMC), and their randomized counterparts (rMLMC), which are able to provably achieve a dimension-independent (including $\infty-$dimension) canonical complexity rate with respect to mean squared error (MSE) of $1/$MSE. Some parallelizability is typically lost in an inference context, but recently this has been largely recovered via novel double randomization approaches. Such an approach delivers i.i.d. samples of quantities of interest which are unbiased with respect to the infinite resolution target distribution. Over the coming decade, this family of algorithms has the potential to transform data centric science and engineering, as well as classical machine learning applications such as deep learning, by scaling up and scaling out fully Bayesian inference.

In this article we consider the linear filtering problem in continuous-time. We develop and apply multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) strategies for ensemble Kalman-Bucy filters (EnKBFs). These filters can be viewed as approximations of conditional McKean-Vlasov-type diffusion processes. They are also interpreted as the continuous-time analogue of the \textit{ensemble Kalman filter}, which has proven to be successful due to its applicability and computational cost. We prove that an ideal version of our multilevel EnKBF can achieve a mean square error (MSE) of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^2), \ \epsilon>0$ with a cost of order $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2}\log(\epsilon)^2)$. In order to prove this result we provide a Monte Carlo convergence and approximation bounds associated to time-discretized EnKBFs. This implies a reduction in cost compared to the (single level) EnKBF which requires a cost of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$ to achieve an MSE of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^2)$. We test our theory on a linear problem, which we motivate through high-dimensional examples of order $\sim \mathcal{O}(10^4)$ and $\mathcal{O}(10^5)$.

In this article we consider a Monte Carlo-based method to filter partially observed diffusions observed at regular and discrete times. Given access only to Euler discretizations of the diffusion process, we present a new procedure which can return online estimates of the filtering distribution with no discretization bias and finite variance. Our approach is based upon a novel double application of the randomization methods of Rhee & Glynn (2015) along with the multilevel particle filter (MLPF) approach of Jasra et al (2017). A numerical comparison of our new approach with the MLPF, on a single processor, shows that similar errors are possible for a mild increase in computational cost. However, the new method scales strongly to arbitrarily many processors.

In the following article we consider the numerical approximation of the non-linear filter in continuous-time, where the observations and signal follow diffusion processes. Given access to high-frequency, but discrete-time observations, we resort to a first order time discretization of the non-linear filter, followed by an Euler discretization of the signal dynamics. In order to approximate the associated discretized non-linear filter, one can use a particle filter (PF). Under assumptions, this can achieve a mean square error of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^2)$, for $\epsilon>0$ arbitrary, such that the associated cost is $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-4})$. We prove, under assumptions, that the multilevel particle filter (MLPF) of Jasra et al (2017) can achieve a mean square error of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^2)$, for cost $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$. This is supported by numerical simulations in several examples.

In this article we prove a new central limit theorem (CLT) for coupled particle filters (CPFs). CPFs are used for the sequential estimation of the difference of expectations w.r.t. filters which are in some sense close. Examples include the estimation of the filtering distribution associated to different parameters (finite difference estimation) and filters associated to partially observed discretized diffusion processes (PODDP) and the implementation of the multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) identity. We develop new theory for CPFs and based upon several results, we propose a new CPF which approximates the maximal coupling (MCPF) of a pair of predictor distributions. In the context of ML estimation associated to PODDP with discretization $\Delta_l$ we show that the MCPF and the approach in Jasra et al. (2018) have, under assumptions, an asymptotic variance that is upper-bounded by an expression that is (almost) $\mathcal{O}(\Delta_l)$, uniformly in time. The $\mathcal{O}(\Delta_l)$ rate preserves the so-called forward rate of the diffusion in some scenarios which is not the case for the CPF in Jasra et al (2017).