papers

Publications (20)

stat.ME2025

Test-Negative Designs with Multiple Testing Sources

Mengxin Yu, Nicholas P. Jewell

Test-negative designs (TNDs), a form of case-cohort study, are widely used to evaluate infectious disease interventions, notably for influenza and, more recently, COVID-19 vaccines…

math.ST2022

Robust High-dimensional Tuning Free Multiple Testing

Jianqing Fan, Zhipeng Lou, Mengxin Yu

A stylized feature of high-dimensional data is that many variables have heavy tails, and robust statistical inference is critical for valid large-scale statistical inference. Yet,…

stat.ME2023

Ranking Inferences Based on the Top Choice of Multiway Comparisons

Jianqing Fan, Zhipeng Lou, Weichen Wang +1

This paper considers ranking inference of items based on the observed data on the top choice among randomly selected items at each trial. This is a useful modification of t…

stat.ME2025

Inference on Nonlinear Counterfactual Functionals under a Multiplicative IV Model

Yonghoon Lee, Mengxin Yu, Jiewen Liu +4

Instrumental variable (IV) methods play a central role in causal inference, particularly in settings where treatment assignment is confounded by unobserved variables. IV methods ha…

stat.ME2024

Uncertainty Quantification of MLE for Entity Ranking with Covariates

Jianqing Fan, Jikai Hou, Mengxin Yu

This paper concerns with statistical estimation and inference for the ranking problems based on pairwise comparisons with additional covariate information such as the attributes of…

stat.ME2024

Spectral Ranking Inferences based on General Multiway Comparisons

Jianqing Fan, Zhipeng Lou, Weichen Wang +1

This paper studies the performance of the spectral method in the estimation and uncertainty quantification of the unobserved preference scores of compared entities in a general and…

stat.ML2021

Understanding Implicit Regularization in Over-Parameterized Single Index Model

Jianqing Fan, Zhuoran Yang, Mengxin Yu

In this paper, we leverage over-parameterization to design regularization-free algorithms for the high-dimensional single index model and provide theoretical guarantees for the ind…

stat.ME2025

Test-negative designs with various reasons for testing: statistical bias and solution

Mengxin Yu, Tom Hongyi Liu, Kendrick Qijun Li +5

Test-negative designs are widely used for post-market evaluation of vaccine effectiveness, particularly in cases when randomized trials are not feasible. Differing from classical t…

cs.AI2026

Foundations of Top- Decoding For Language Models

Georgy Noarov, Soham Mallick, Tao Wang +5

Top- decoding is a widely used method for sampling from LLMs: at each token, only the largest next-token-probabilities are kept, and the next token is sampled after re-norma…

cs.AI2026

Statistical Early Stopping for Reasoning Models

Yangxinyu Xie, Tao Wang, Soham Mallick +6

While LLMs have seen substantial improvement in reasoning capabilities, they also sometimes overthink, generating unnecessary reasoning steps, particularly under uncertainty, given…

stat.ME2026

Conditional Predictive Inference for General Structured Data with Group Symmetries

Yichen Shen, Mengxin Yu

We study distribution-free predictive inference for data with group symmetries, aiming to establish near-conditional coverage guarantees beyond exchangeability for structured data.…

cs.LG2022

Policy Optimization Using Semi-parametric Models for Dynamic Pricing

Jianqing Fan, Yongyi Guo, Mengxin Yu

In this paper, we study the contextual dynamic pricing problem where the market value of a product is linear in its observed features plus some market noise. Products are sold one…

stat.ME2022

Are Latent Factor Regression and Sparse Regression Adequate?

Jianqing Fan, Zhipeng Lou, Mengxin Yu

We propose the Factor Augmented sparse linear Regression Model (FARM) that not only encompasses both the latent factor regression and sparse linear regression as special cases but…

stat.ME2026

The Multiplicative Instrumental Variable Model

Jiewen Liu, Chan Park, Yonghoon Lee +4

The instrumental variable (IV) design is a common approach to address hidden confounding bias. For validity, an IV must impact the outcome only through its association with the tre…

stat.ME2024

Conformal causal inference for cluster randomized trials: model-robust inference without asymptotic approximations

Bingkai Wang, Fan Li, Mengxin Yu

Traditional statistical inference in cluster randomized trials typically invokes the asymptotic theory that requires the number of clusters to approach infinity. In this article, w…

cs.CL2024

Uncertainty in Language Models: Assessment through Rank-Calibration

Xinmeng Huang, Shuo Li, Mengxin Yu +5

Language Models (LMs) have shown promising performance in natural language generation. However, as LMs often generate incorrect or hallucinated responses, it is crucial to correctl…

stat.ME2024

SymmPI: Predictive Inference for Data with Group Symmetries

Edgar Dobriban, Mengxin Yu

Quantifying the uncertainty of predictions is a core problem in modern statistics. Methods for predictive inference have been developed under a variety of assumptions, often -- for…

stat.ME2024

Covariate Assisted Entity Ranking with Sparse Intrinsic Scores

Jianqing Fan, Jikai Hou, Mengxin Yu

This paper addresses the item ranking problem with associate covariates, focusing on scenarios where the preference scores can not be fully explained by covariates, and the remaini…

stat.ME2025

A Multiplicative Instrumental Variable Model for Data Missing Not-at-Random

Yunshu Zhang, Chan Park, Jiewen Liu +4

Instrumental variable (IV) methods offer a valuable approach to account for outcome data missing not-at-random. A valid missing data instrument is a measured factor which (i) predi…

stat.ML2022

Strategic Decision-Making in the Presence of Information Asymmetry: Provably Efficient RL with Algorithmic Instruments

Mengxin Yu, Zhuoran Yang, Jianqing Fan

We study offline reinforcement learning under a novel model called strategic MDP, which characterizes the strategic interactions between a principal and a sequence of myopic agents…