Jie Cheng

Eric Cheng, Jie Cheng

Decision trees are a commonly used class of machine learning models valued for their interpretability and versatility, capable of both classification and regression. We propose ZTree, a novel decision tree learning framework that replaces CART's traditional purity based splitting with statistically principled subgroup identification. At each node, ZTree applies hypothesis testing (e.g., z-tests, t-tests, Mann-Whitney U, log-rank) to assess whether a candidate subgroup differs meaningfully from the complement. To adjust for the complication of multiple testing, we employ a cross-validation-based approach to determine if further node splitting is needed. This robust stopping criterion eliminates the need for post-pruning and makes the test threshold (z-threshold) the only parameter for controlling tree complexity. Because of the simplicity of the tree growing procedure, once a detailed tree is learned using the most lenient z-threshold, all simpler trees can be derived by simply removing nodes that do not meet the larger z-thresholds. This makes parameter tuning intuitive and efficient. Furthermore, this z-threshold is essentially a p-value, allowing users to easily plug in appropriate statistical tests into our framework without adjusting the range of parameter search. Empirical evaluation on five large-scale UCI datasets demonstrates that ZTree consistently delivers strong performance, especially at low data regimes. Compared to CART, ZTree also tends to grow simpler trees without sacrificing performance. ZTree introduces a statistically grounded alternative to traditional decision tree splitting by leveraging hypothesis testing and a cross-validation approach to multiple testing correction, resulting in an efficient and flexible framework.

Haimei Pan, Jiyun Zhang, Qinxi Wei et al.

Fire is a highly destructive disaster, but effective prevention can significantly reduce its likelihood of occurrence. When it happens, deploying emergency robots in fire-risk scenarios can help minimize the danger to human responders. However, current research on pre-disaster warnings and disaster-time rescue still faces significant challenges due to incomplete perception, inadequate fire situational awareness, and delayed response. To enhance intelligent perception and response planning for robots in fire scenarios, we first construct a knowledge graph (KG) by leveraging large language models (LLMs) to integrate fire domain knowledge derived from fire prevention guidelines and fire rescue task information from robotic emergency response documents. We then propose a new framework called Insights-on-Graph (IOG), which integrates the structured fire information of KG and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). The framework generates perception-driven risk graphs from real-time scene imagery to enable early fire risk detection and provide interpretable emergency responses for task module and robot component configuration based on the evolving risk situation. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments show that IOG has good applicability and practical application value in fire risk detection and rescue decision-making.

Prashanth L. A., Cheng Jie, Michael Fu et al.

Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) is known to model human decisions well, with substantial empirical evidence supporting this claim. CPT works by distorting probabilities and is more general than the classic expected utility and coherent risk measures. We bring this idea to a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) setting and design algorithms for both estimation and control. The RL setting presents two particular challenges when CPT is applied: estimating the CPT objective requires estimations of the entire distribution of the value function and finding a randomized optimal policy. The estimation scheme that we propose uses the empirical distribution to estimate the CPT-value of a random variable. We then use this scheme in the inner loop of a CPT-value optimization procedure that is based on the well-known simulation optimization idea of simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA). We provide theoretical convergence guarantees for all the proposed algorithms and also illustrate the usefulness of CPT-based criteria in a traffic signal control application.