ProME: Prototype-Margin Environments with Repair-Aware Selection for Group-Robust Learning

Group-robust learning is crucial for maintaining accuracy on rare subpopulations when training-group labels are unavailable. However, existing methods often infer environments from a separate reference model and select representations before fitting the classifier used at deployment, leaving both decisions misaligned with the deployed predictor. In this work, we formulate group robustness without training-group labels as the endogenous environments with repair-aware selection (ERAS) problem, and propose ProME (Prototype-Margin Environments) to align both decisions with the deployed predictor. ProME splits prototype margins at their median to construct approximately balanced environments along the training trajectory, and fits a group-balanced linear head on group-annotated validation data to rank the resulting predictors by validation worst-group accuracy. We theoretically bound the worst risk across the inferred environments for a fixed predictor and partition, showing that this bound transfers to the oracle groups under an explicit alignment condition. Extensive experiments show that prototype margins enrich shortcut-conflicting examples, classifier repair reshapes candidate evaluation, and ProME achieves the highest average worst-group accuracy among the compared methods with the same group-label access.

Conditionally Identifiable Latent-Environment Modeling for Out-of-Distribution Recommendation

Out-of-distribution (OOD) recommendation is vulnerable to preference shifts induced by a latent environment. Existing methods can infer latent states from logged interactions, yet the statistical meaning of the latent environment and its effect on preference remain underdetermined. We formulate this task as conditionally identifiable risk-aware recommendation (CI-RR) and propose Conditionally Identifiable Latent-Environment Recommendation (CILER). CILER uses a user-conditioned exponential family to model the latent environment and a feature-indexed polynomial to specify how it changes preference. It predicts by marginalizing item probabilities over the inferred environment distribution. Under sufficient variation, correct specification, and decoder regularity, CILER identifies the environment-sensitive representation up to the stated equivalence class. We further bound excess deployment log-risk by environment-inference error. Controlled studies test the observable consequences of sufficient variation and model specification. Experiments on three datasets show that CILER improves all twelve OOD ranking metrics under feature, temporal, and geographical shifts within shared support.

Manifold Regularized Tucker Decomposition Approach for Spatiotemporal Traffic Data Imputation

Spatiotemporal traffic data imputation (STDI), estimating the missing data from partially observed traffic data, is an inevitable and challenging task in data-driven intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Due to traffic data's multidimensional and spatiotemporal properties, we treat the missing data imputation as a tensor completion problem. Many studies have been on STDI based on tensor decomposition in the past decade. However, how to use spatiotemporal correlations and core tensor sparsity to improve the imputation performance still needs to be solved. This paper reshapes a 3rd/4th order Hankel tensor and proposes an innovative manifold regularized Tucker decomposition (ManiRTD) model for STDI. Expressly, we represent the sensory traffic state data as the 3rd/4th tensors by introducing Multiway Delay Embedding Transforms. Then, ManiRTD improves the sparsity of the Tucker core using a sparse regularization term and employs manifold regularization and temporal constraint terms of factor matrices to characterize the spatiotemporal correlations. Finally, we address the ManiRTD model through a block coordinate descent framework under alternating proximal gradient updating rules with convergence-guaranteed. Numerical experiments are conducted on real-world spatiotemporal traffic datasets (STDs). Our results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the other factorization approaches and reconstructs the STD more precisely under various missing scenarios.