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Aakash Bhagat

Publications and source records attributed to Aakash Bhagat.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Psych-ECA: A Reproducible Semi-Synthetic Benchmark for Synthetic Control Arms in Longitudinal Psychiatry

External and synthetic control arms (ECAs) are entering psychiatric drug development, but the field lacks a benchmark that evaluates the properties regulators care about: not only how accurately a method reconstructs untreated trajectories, but whether its uncertainty is calibrated, whether it is robust to the informative observation times common in mental-health records (sicker patients are seen more often), and what false-positive rate it induces in go/no-go trial decisions. Real psychiatric trial data (e.g. STAR-D and registry cohorts) require credentialed access and lack ground-truth counterfactuals, so, following established semi-synthetic benchmarks in causal inference (IHDP, ACIC, and the PK-PD tumor-growth simulator), we release Psych-ECA, a fully reproducible generator of longitudinal symptom trajectories for depression (PHQ-9), anxiety (HAM-A), and psychosis (PANSS) with known counterfactual control arms, informative visits, and validated-scale measurement noise. We benchmark eight estimators spanning carry-forward, pooled real-world-data averages, nearest-neighbour matching, linear mixed models, gradient boosting, and the Scribe trajectory-bridge method. Three findings emerge. First, trajectory and flexible machine learning methods achieve the best counterfactual accuracy (about 2.3 PHQ-9 RMSE), outperforming cross-sectional baselines. Second, only Scribe is both accurate and calibrated, achieving 93-96% empirical coverage of nominal 90% prediction intervals, compared with 87-88% for gradient boosting and 62-75% for uncalibrated SDE models. Third, inverse-intensity correction reduces bias under informative sampling, while Scribe's calibrated intervals are the only trajectory method that maintains nominal false-positive rates as informativeness increases. We release all code, data-generation scripts, and random seeds to enable fully reproducible evaluation.

stat.AP

Do Enterprise Systems Need Learned World Models? The Importance of Context to Infer Dynamics

World models enable agents to anticipate the effects of their actions by internalizing environment dynamics. In enterprise systems, however, these dynamics are often defined by tenant-specific business logic that varies across deployments and evolves over time, making models trained on historical transitions brittle under deployment shift. We ask a question the world-models literature has not addressed: when the rules can be read at inference time, does an agent still need to learn them? We argue, and demonstrate empirically, that in settings where transition dynamics are configurable and readable, runtime discovery complements offline training by grounding predictions in the active system instance. We propose enterprise discovery agents, which recover relevant transition dynamics at runtime by reading the system's configuration rather than relying solely on internalized representations. We introduce CascadeBench, a reasoning-focused benchmark for enterprise cascade prediction that adopts the evaluation methodology of World of Workflows on diverse synthetic environments, and use it together with deployment-shift evaluation to show that offline-trained world models can perform well in-distribution but degrade as dynamics change, whereas discovery-based agents are more robust under shift by grounding their predictions in the current instance. Our findings suggest that, in configurable enterprise environments, agents should not rely solely on fixed internalized dynamics, but should incorporate mechanisms for discovering relevant transition logic at runtime.

cs.AI

AprielGuard

Safeguarding large language models (LLMs) against unsafe or adversarial behavior is critical as they are increasingly deployed in conversational and agentic settings. Existing moderation tools often treat safety risks (e.g. toxicity, bias) and adversarial threats (e.g. prompt injections, jailbreaks) as separate problems, limiting their robustness and generalizability. We introduce AprielGuard, an 8B parameter safeguard model that unify these dimensions within a single taxonomy and learning framework. AprielGuard is trained on a diverse mix of open and synthetic data covering standalone prompts, multi-turn conversations, and agentic workflows, augmented with structured reasoning traces to improve interpretability. Across multiple public and proprietary benchmarks, AprielGuard achieves strong performance in detecting harmful content and adversarial manipulations, outperforming existing opensource guardrails such as Llama-Guard and Granite Guardian, particularly in multi-step and reasoning intensive scenarios. By releasing the model, we aim to advance transparent and reproducible research on reliable safeguards for LLMs.

cs.CL