Rim Kaddah

Lucas Thil, Jesse Read, Rim Kaddah et al.

We present a novel method for learning interpretable representations of progressive time series, that is, data capturing irreversible state transitions such as degradation or task completion. Our approach uses a self-supervised contrastive objective to learn a low-dimensional latent space whose geometry is itself the interpretation: each observation becomes a point on a manifold anchored between two fixed orthogonal prototype vectors, and a trajectory becomes a path across that manifold. From this structure we read a latent compass, the polar coordinates (θ, r) of the latent vector, in which θ tracks the progression of the underlying state (e.g., from healthy to failed) and r identifies the active mode (e.g., the operating condition), without any proxy labels. We evaluate the approach against the state of the art on diverse domains, including industrial degradation, robotic tasks, and neural activity, validating three key capabilities: (1) end-state prediction, (2) multi-step forecasting, and (3) interpretable phase separation. Our method matches or improves over black-box counterparts on all of these while providing transparency about the underlying mechanisms. A simple linear regressor on top of the latent compass coordinates is competitive with deep architectures, direct quantitative evidence that the underlying state is encoded in a geometrically accessible form.

Lucas Thil, Jesse Read, Rim Kaddah et al.

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) learn compact latent world models by predicting future embeddings, but no single coordinate of the latent is designated to encode task progression. We carve the JEPA latent into two orthogonal subspaces with disjoint roles: a low-dimensional progression subspace shaped by a cosine-margin triplet loss, and a high-dimensional content subspace regularised by the existing SIGReg objective of LeWM. We prove that the two anti-collapse forces act on disjoint coordinates, so they compose additively rather than competing on the same dimensions. Our method, SD-JEPA improves over the LeWM baseline on the majority of its control benchmarks at matched compute, and outperforms the strongest non-LeWM JEPA baseline on Push-T; a subspace-ablation falsifier confirms the split is the load-bearing ingredient. Beyond planning, the resulting 1-D angular progression coordinate functions as a scene-aware compass on the latent. It advances with task progress, regresses when the agent backtracks, and under controlled perturbations both spikes and relocalises to a semantically appropriate new task-phase sector, separating the moment of surprise from its meaning in a way that prediction-error scalars cannot. Three quantitative tests back this up: $|Δθ_t|$ outperforms the standard latent-prediction-error surprise at localising semantic events on 40 held-out cube episodes by up to +0.18 pooled AUROC (97.5% per-episode win rate at $\pm 1$-step tolerance); a within-episode linear probe across all four environments (40 episodes per env) shows the 8-dimensional progression subspace (4.2% of the latent) explains 72-95% of task-progress variance..

Simo Alami C., Jérémie Decock, Rim Kaddah et al.

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) seeks to save energy by estimating individual appliance power usage from a single aggregate measurement. Deep neural networks have become increasingly popular in attempting to solve NILM problems. However most used models are used for Load Identification rather than online Source Separation. Among source separation models, most use a single-task learning approach in which a neural network is trained exclusively for each appliance. This strategy is computationally expensive and ignores the fact that multiple appliances can be active simultaneously and dependencies between them. The rest of models are not causal, which is important for real-time application. Inspired by Convtas-Net, a model for speech separation, we propose Conv-NILM-net, a fully convolutional framework for end-to-end NILM. Conv-NILM-net is a causal model for multi appliance source separation. Our model is tested on two real datasets REDD and UK-DALE and clearly outperforms the state of the art while keeping a significantly smaller size than the competing models.

Simo Alami. C, Fernando Llorente, Rim Kaddah et al.

Reinforcement Learning has drawn huge interest as a tool for solving optimal control problems. Solving a given problem (task or environment) involves converging towards an optimal policy. However, there might exist multiple optimal policies that can dramatically differ in their behaviour; for example, some may be faster than the others but at the expense of greater risk. We consider and study a distribution of optimal policies. We design a curiosity-augmented Metropolis algorithm (CAMEO), such that we can sample optimal policies, and such that these policies effectively adopt diverse behaviours, since this implies greater coverage of the different possible optimal policies. In experimental simulations we show that CAMEO indeed obtains policies that all solve classic control problems, and even in the challenging case of environments that provide sparse rewards. We further show that the different policies we sample present different risk profiles, corresponding to interesting practical applications in interpretability, and represents a first step towards learning the distribution of optimal policies itself.

Simo Alami. C, Rim Kaddah, Jesse Read

Clustering in high dimension spaces is a difficult task; the usual distance metrics may no longer be appropriate under the curse of dimensionality. Indeed, the choice of the metric is crucial, and it is highly dependent on the dataset characteristics. However a single metric could be used to correctly perform clustering on multiple datasets of different domains. We propose to do so, providing a framework for learning a transferable metric. We show that we can learn a metric on a labelled dataset, then apply it to cluster a different dataset, using an embedding space that characterises a desired clustering in the generic sense. We learn and test such metrics on several datasets of variable complexity (synthetic, MNIST, SVHN, omniglot) and achieve results competitive with the state-of-the-art while using only a small number of labelled training datasets and shallow networks.

Lucas Thil, Jesse Read, Rim Kaddah et al.

Accurate remaining useful life (RUL) prediction hinges on the quality of health indicators (HIs), yet existing methods often fail to disentangle complex degradation mechanisms in multi-sensor systems or quantify uncertainty in HI reliability. This paper introduces a novel framework for HI construction, advancing three key contributions. First, we adapt Reconstruction along Projected Pathways (RaPP) as a health indicator (HI) for RUL prediction for the first time, showing that it outperforms traditional reconstruction error metrics. Second, we show that augmenting RaPP-derived HIs with aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty quantification (UQ) via Monte Carlo dropout and probabilistic latent spaces- significantly improves RUL-prediction robustness. Third, and most critically, we propose indicator groups, a paradigm that isolates sensor subsets to model system-specific degradations, giving rise to our novel method, I-GLIDE which enables interpretable, mechanism-specific diagnostics. Evaluated on data sourced from aerospace and manufacturing systems, our approach achieves marked improvements in accuracy and generalizability compared to state-of-the-art HI methods while providing actionable insights into system failure pathways. This work bridges the gap between anomaly detection and prognostics, offering a principled framework for uncertainty-aware degradation modeling in complex systems.

Simo Alami C., Rim Kaddah, Jesse Read et al.

We introduce a new architecture for Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DistRL) that models return distributions using normalizing flows. This approach enables flexible, unbounded support for return distributions, in contrast to categorical approaches like C51 that rely on fixed or bounded representations. It also offers richer modeling capacity to capture multi-modality, skewness, and tail behavior than quantile based approaches. Our method is significantly more parameter-efficient than categorical approaches. Standard metrics used to train existing models like KL divergence or Wasserstein distance either are scale insensitive or have biased sample gradients, especially when return supports do not overlap. To address this, we propose a novel surrogate for the Cramèr distance, that is geometry-aware and computable directly from the return distribution's PDF, avoiding the costly CDF computation. We test our model on the ATARI-5 sub-benchmark and show that our approach outperforms PDF based models while remaining competitive with quantile based methods.