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Ali Baheri

Ali Baheri contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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eess.SY Systems and Control Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Robotics Computation and Language eess.SP

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preprint2026arXiv

Adaptive Conformal Prediction via Bayesian Uncertainty Weighting for Hierarchical Healthcare Data

Clinical decision-making demands uncertainty quantification that provides both distribution-free coverage guarantees and risk-adaptive precision, requirements that existing methods fail to jointly satisfy. We present a hybrid Bayesian-conformal framework that addresses this fundamental limitation in healthcare predictions. Our approach integrates Bayesian hierarchical random forests with group-aware conformal calibration, using posterior uncertainties to weight conformity scores while maintaining rigorous coverage validity. Evaluated on 61,538 admissions across 3,793 U.S. hospitals and 4 regions, our method achieves target coverage (94.3% vs 95% target) with adaptive precision: 21% narrower intervals for low-uncertainty cases while appropriately widening for high-risk predictions. Critically, we demonstrate that well-calibrated Bayesian uncertainties alone severely under-cover (14.1%), highlighting the necessity of our hybrid approach. This framework enables risk-stratified clinical protocols, efficient resource planning for high-confidence predictions, and conservative allocation with enhanced oversight for uncertain cases, providing uncertainty-aware decision support across diverse healthcare settings.

preprint2026arXiv

Can Optimal Transport Improve Federated Inverse Reinforcement Learning?

In robotics and multi-agent systems, fleets of autonomous agents often operate in subtly different environments while pursuing a common high-level objective. Directly pooling their data to learn a shared reward function is typically impractical due to differences in dynamics, privacy constraints, and limited communication bandwidth. This paper introduces an optimal transport-based approach to federated inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). Each client first performs lightweight Maximum Entropy IRL locally, adhering to its computational and privacy limitations. The resulting reward functions are then fused via a Wasserstein barycenter, which considers their underlying geometric structure. We further prove that this barycentric fusion yields a more faithful global reward estimate than conventional parameter averaging methods in federated learning. Overall, this work provides a principled and communication-efficient framework for deriving a shared reward that generalizes across heterogeneous agents and environments.

preprint2026arXiv

Can We Formally Verify Neural PDE Surrogates? SMT Compilation of Small Fourier Neural Operators

Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs) can greatly accelerate PDE simulation, but they are often used without formal guarantees that they preserve basic physical structure. We show that, once the trained weights and grid are fixed, the spectral convolution in an FNO is a linear map. As a result, the full forward pass is piecewise-linear and can be represented exactly in Z3's linear real arithmetic. We study two encodings. The exact encoding compiles the spectral convolution into a dense matrix multiplication, which is sound for both proofs and counterexamples. The lighter frozen encoding replaces the spectral path with a constant, making it faster but approximate. On 10 small FNO surrogates for 1D advection-diffusion-reaction (85 to 117 parameters, grids 8 to 32), the exact encoding gives 2 sound positivity proofs on linear (ReLU-free) models, 5 sound positivity counterexamples, and 10 sound mass-violation counterexamples; the remaining 3 positivity queries on ReLU models time out. For mass non-increase, Z3 finds worse counterexamples than both gradient-based falsification and Monte Carlo on 7 of 10 models. The frozen encoding scales to grid size 64 with sub-second positivity checks, but it no longer provides certificates for the original FNO. Overall, the results make the soundness--scalability tradeoff explicit and point to what is needed for formal verification of production-scale neural operators.

preprint2026arXiv

Where Does Reasoning Break? Step-Level Hallucination Detection via Hidden-State Transport Geometry

Large language models hallucinate during multi-step reasoning, but most existing detectors operate at the trace level: they assign one confidence score to a full output, fail to localize the first error, and often require multiple sampled completions. We frame hallucination instead as a property of the hidden-state trajectory produced during a single forward pass. Correct reasoning moves through a stable manifold of locally coherent transitions; a first error appears as a localized excursion in transport cost away from this manifold. We operationalize this view with a label-conditioned teacher that builds a trace-specific contrastive PCA lens and scores each step with seven geometric transition features, and a deployable BiLSTM student distilled from the teacher that operates on raw hidden states without inference-time labels. We prove that contrastive PCA is the optimal projection for a transport-separation objective between first error and correct states, and that single-pass first error localization holds whenever the first error creates a positive transport margin over preceding correct transitions. On ProcessBench, PRM800K, HaluEval, and TruthfulQA, both models outperform entropy-based, probing-based, and attention-based baselines in-domain; the teacher transfers stably across language models and datasets, while the student collapses under shift, a gap our distillation theory predicts. These results recast step-level hallucination detection as a problem of trajectory dynamics and identify the central obstacle to deployment: preserving the contrastive transport margin under distribution shift.

preprint2022arXiv

A Framework for Controlling Multi-Robot Systems Using Bayesian Optimization and Linear Combination of Vectors

We propose a general framework for creating parameterized control schemes for decentralized multi-robot systems. A variety of tasks can be seen in the decentralized multi-robot literature, each with many possible control schemes. For several of them, the agents choose control velocities using algorithms that extract information from the environment and combine that information in meaningful ways. From this basic formation, a framework is proposed that classifies each robots' measurement information as sets of relevant scalars and vectors and creates a linear combination of the measured vector sets. Along with an optimizable parameter set, the scalar measurements are used to generate the coefficients for the linear combination. With this framework and Bayesian optimization, we can create effective control systems for several multi-robot tasks, including cohesion and segregation, pattern formation, and searching/foraging.

preprint2022arXiv

A Verification Framework for Certifying Learning-Based Safety-Critical Aviation Systems

We present a safety verification framework for design-time and run-time assurance of learning-based components in aviation systems. Our proposed framework integrates two novel methodologies. From the design-time assurance perspective, we propose offline mixed-fidelity verification tools that incorporate knowledge from different levels of granularity in simulated environments. From the run-time assurance perspective, we propose reachability- and statistics-based online monitoring and safety guards for a learning-based decision-making model to complement the offline verification methods. This framework is designed to be loosely coupled among modules, allowing the individual modules to be developed using independent methodologies and techniques, under varying circumstances and with different tool access. The proposed framework offers feasible solutions for meeting system safety requirements at different stages throughout the system development and deployment cycle, enabling the continuous learning and assessment of the system product.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Reinforcement Learning with Enhanced Safety for Autonomous Highway Driving

In this paper, we present a safe deep reinforcement learning system for automated driving. The proposed framework leverages merits of both rule-based and learning-based approaches for safety assurance. Our safety system consists of two modules namely handcrafted safety and dynamically-learned safety. The handcrafted safety module is a heuristic safety rule based on common driving practice that ensure a minimum relative gap to a traffic vehicle. On the other hand, the dynamically-learned safety module is a data-driven safety rule that learns safety patterns from driving data. Specifically, the dynamically-leaned safety module incorporates a model lookahead beyond the immediate reward of reinforcement learning to predict safety longer into the future. If one of the future states leads to a near-miss or collision, then a negative reward will be assigned to the reward function to avoid collision and accelerate the learning process. We demonstrate the capability of the proposed framework in a simulation environment with varying traffic density. Our results show the superior capabilities of the policy enhanced with dynamically-learned safety module.

preprint2020arXiv

Vision-Based Autonomous Driving: A Model Learning Approach

We present an integrated approach for perception and control for an autonomous vehicle and demonstrate this approach in a high-fidelity urban driving simulator. Our approach first builds a model for the environment, then trains a policy exploiting the learned model to identify the action to take at each time-step. To build a model for the environment, we leverage several deep learning algorithms. To that end, first we train a variational autoencoder to encode the input image into an abstract latent representation. We then utilize a recurrent neural network to predict the latent representation of the next frame and handle temporal information. Finally, we utilize an evolutionary-based reinforcement learning algorithm to train a controller based on these latent representations to identify the action to take. We evaluate our approach in CARLA, a high-fidelity urban driving simulator, and conduct an extensive generalization study. Our results demonstrate that our approach outperforms several previously reported approaches in terms of the percentage of successfully completed episodes for a lane keeping task.

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