financial risk analysts

Abstract: CounterFactual Examples (CFEs) are a cornerstone of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), offering local, post hoc, and model-agnostic explanations by identifying minimal input modifications that alter a model's prediction. Yet, in order to be intelligible, these modifications must also be semantically meaningful to the explainee. This paper proposes to integrate knowledge expressed as a fuzzy linguistic vocabulary to represent the explainee's perception and interpretation of the data. The domain induced by this fuzzy vocabulary imposes structural constraints that make the features dependent, preventing the use of gradient-based optimisation methods for CFE generation, e.g., DiCE. The paper proposes a continuous data embedding in this linguistic domain and exploits it to define a variant of DiCE that allows personalisation for the explainee, named DiCEf. As illustrated by experimental results on a real-world dataset, this extension of the DiCE method enables the generation of CFEs that are linguistically perceptible while preserving cost minimality, sparsity, and diversity.

Abstract: Conformal prediction provides distribution-free uncertainty quantification under exchangeability. However, this assumption is violated by label shift, where the marginal distribution of labels changes while the conditional distribution of inputs given labels remains stable. Under such shifts, standard conformal procedures no longer maintain their intended coverage behavior. Existing approaches address this via importance weighting. They pair the reweighting with residual-based nonconformity scores that ignore predictive uncertainty. The resulting intervals have uniform width. Bayesian conformal methods produce adaptive intervals by leveraging predictive distributions. They evaluate conformity under the source predictive, which is misaligned with the target domain under label shift. We propose the \emph{Label-Shift-Adjusted Bayesian Score} (LSA score), a nonconformity score derived from a posterior predictive tilting identity. This identity shows that the target predictive is an importance-weighted transformation of the source predictive. We use it to derive a direct correction to the Bayesian score. We evaluate the method on molecular property prediction under controlled label shift. The LSA score consistently yields shorter intervals than residual-based and source-based Bayesian scores. Coverage in the target domain remains comparable. Under stronger shift, all methods incur some coverage loss due to pseudo-label-based density-ratio estimation. The LSA score is defined for any source predictive with a tractable log-density. We instantiate it with Bayesian Ridge Regression, where the correction admits a closed form.

Abstract: We develop Gaussian approximation bounds in higher-order Wasserstein distance $W_p$, $p\geq2$, for sums of multivariate martingale differences generated by a uniformly ergodic Markov chain. Under an $L^{(2+η)p}$-moment condition with $η>0$, we establish the explicit bound $$ O\left( p^3 \|A\|_4^2 + pd^{1/4}\|A\|_2^{1/2}\|A\|_4^2 \right) $$ where $A\in\mathbb{R}^n$ collects the $L^{(2+η)p}$-sizes of the $n$ individual martingale increments. In the balanced-increment regime where the individual increments have comparable sizes of order $n^{-1/2}$, it yields the first optimal $O(n^{-1/2})$ Gaussian approximation rate for fixed $p$ and $d$. Consequently, we also obtain the first optimal $O(n^{-1/2})$ $W_p$ Gaussian approximation rate for multivariate additive functionals of uniformly ergodic Markov chains. Our analysis develops two techniques for addressing the interplay between higher-order Wasserstein distance and temporal dependence. First, building on the Ornstein--Uhlenbeck relative-score approach of Fang and Koike (2023), we formulate the bound in terms of antisymmetric Stein couplings while retaining the conditional tensor structure. Second, we develop a refresh-then-maximal coupling that combines an independent first-step resampling, which preserves the desired Stein identity, with a subsequent maximal coupling that provides effective control of the coupling increment. These tools may be useful more broadly for Gaussian approximation under temporal dependence.

Abstract: A wrong number is worse than no answer. Across factuality-critical domains -- audience metrics, scheduling and rights in media; dosages and lab values in healthcare; figures and citations in finance and legal -- a confident but fabricated value is more damaging than an honest admission of uncertainty. Yet this is the dominant failure mode we observe on small local language models: even when correct evidence is present in context, models fabricate plausible numbers and timestamps. Recent work characterizes a real limit of this regime: below 7B parameters, the bottleneck of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is not retrieval quality but context utilization. We present Noesis, the deterministic-first query plane of the Noesis architecture, which makes every deterministic judgment before generation. Its mechanisms follow from the ingestion architecture (subject of a separate patent application): (a) a producer-side fact layer rendering precomputed metric facts verbatim without ranking; (b) positional addressing with deterministic cross-source alignment, resolved ahead of query time at zero LLM cost; (c) provenance scoping as an attribution constraint with multi-tier named-reference routing; and (d) two-tier context with model-triggered verbatim hydration. Across four ablations, a 2B model reaches parity with a 35B model on factual integrity (exact values in all runs; zero confabulated numbers on absent-entity traps); structured retrieval beats flat RAG by +11.4 points at 2B; skeleton-only context preserves quantitative answers at 20-30% smaller prompts; and hydration recovers verbatim narrative in ~8s versus ~29s. Two properties matter for regulated domains: each query resolves in a single generation call, and every reported value is traceable to its exact source and position by construction.