Chua Tat Seng | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

PAWS: Policy-driven Agentic World Simulation

Policy interventions propagate through public communication, institutional decisions, and stakeholder responses, yet datasets for financial multi-agent simulation rarely connect these processes to temporally aligned historical evidence. We introduce PAWS, a Policy-driven Agentic World Simulation dataset covering 36 verified U.S. financial and economic policy episodes, 12,727 policy-linked news records, and 65,291 source-grounded stakeholder actions. Each action is linked to its supporting news and represented by a multi-layer event frame capturing its interaction mode, financial-action family and subtype, semantic attributes, and conditional mappings to external taxonomies. Entities are resolved to normalized organizations, and actions are aligned with daily market-return context to support policy-agent simulation replay. On 2,522 stratified action samples, independent AI and human reviewers achieved 89.4% initial agreement on interaction mode, with disagreements subsequently adjudicated. Case studies of the 2008 short-selling ban and 2001 decimalization recover documented policy timelines and associated market patterns across both dense and sparse news settings. A replay study further shows that high accuracy can mask failure to detect rare stakeholder actions, identifying action timing and calibration as central challenges. PAWS provides an auditable substrate for evaluating agent influence, policy-response cascades, and action-outcome alignment in historically grounded financial simulations.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2020

Adversarial TCAV -- Robust and Effective Interpretation of Intermediate Layers in Neural Networks

Interpreting neural network decisions and the information learned in intermediate layers is still a challenge due to the opaque internal state and shared non-linear interactions. Although (Kim et al, 2017) proposed to interpret intermediate layers by quantifying its ability to distinguish a user-defined concept (from random examples), the questions of robustness (variation against the choice of random examples) and effectiveness (retrieval rate of concept images) remain. We investigate these two properties and propose improvements to make concept activations reliable for practical use. Effectiveness: If the intermediate layer has effectively learned a user-defined concept, it should be able to recall --- at the testing step --- most of the images containing the proposed concept. For instance, we observed that the recall rate of Tiger shark and Great white shark from the ImageNet dataset with "Fins" as a user-defined concept was only 18.35% for VGG16. To increase the effectiveness of concept learning, we propose A-CAV --- the Adversarial Concept Activation Vector --- this results in larger margins between user concepts and (negative) random examples. This approach improves the aforesaid recall to 76.83% for VGG16. For robustness, we define it as the ability of an intermediate layer to be consistent in its recall rate (the effectiveness) for different random seeds. We observed that TCAV has a large variance in recalling a concept across different random seeds. For example, the recall of cat images (from a layer learning the concept of tail) varies from 18% to 86% with 20.85% standard deviation on VGG16. We propose a simple and scalable modification that employs a Gram-Schmidt process to sample random noise from concepts and learn an average "concept classifier". This approach improves the aforesaid standard deviation from 20.85% to 6.4%.

cs.LG↗