INDY Lab

Information and Network Dynamics

Information and Network Dynamics group

Our research group is part of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. The group is lead by Matthias Grossglauser and Patrick Thiran. Our research focuses broadly on the statistical modeling of large dynamical systems involving both human and technical agents. Examples include social and information networks, epidemic processes, human mobility and transportation, and recommender systems. Our work lies at the intersection of machine learning, probabilistic modeling, large-scale data analytics, and performance analysis. Here are the research areas we work on:

Graph Mining

Network alignment, network assembly, and network inference

Mobility Mining

Prediction and transfer learning in populations

Epidemics

Monitoring, prediction, and source inference

Distributed Processes on Graphs

Gossiping, voting, and optimization

Discrete-Choice Models

Large-scale inference and ranking

Active Learning

Multi-armed bandits, online optimization, active learning

Wireless and Hybrid Networking

Wireless networking, power-line communication, hybrid networking

Applications

In computational biology, data privacy, medical data analytics, etc.

Recent publications

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Targeted Causal Interventions
M. Khorasani, S. Salehkaleybar, N. Kiyavash and M. Grossglauser
42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2025, Vancouver, 2025-07-13 - 2025-07-19.

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) improves the efficiency of long-horizon reinforcement-learning tasks with sparse rewards by decomposing the task into a hierarchy of subgoals. The main challenge of HRL is efficient discovery of the hierarchical structure among subgoals and utilizing this structure to achieve the final goal. We address this challenge by modeling the subgoal structure as a causal graph and propose a causal discovery algorithm to learn it. Additionally, rather than intervening on the subgoals at random during exploration, we harness the discovered causal model to prioritize subgoal interventions based on their importance in attaining the final goal. These targeted interventions result in a significantly more efficient policy in terms of the training cost. Unlike previous work on causal HRL, which lacked theoretical analysis, we provide a formal analysis of the problem. Specifically, for tree structures and, for a variant of Erdős-Rényi random graphs, our approach results in remarkable improvements. Our experimental results on HRL tasks also illustrate that our proposed framework outperforms existing work in terms of training cost.

Assessing the Performance of NOMA in a Multi-Cell Context: A General Evaluation Framework
A. Bardou, J. M. Gorce and T. Begin
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 1 - 1, 2025.
[view at publisher]

Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) is a Resource Sharing Mechanism (RSM) initially studied for 5G cellular networks and brought back to the agenda for 6G networks. While NOMA’s benefit at the level of a single cell has been properly established, assessing its performance at the scale of a cellular network remains an open research problem. This is mainly due to the inter-dependencies between scheduling, power control and inter-cell interference. Some algorithms have been proposed to optimize resource allocation in a multi-cell network, but they require a perfect and unrealistic knowledge of the whole channel states. In this paper, we leverage Bayesian Optimization techniques to build a versatile evaluation framework, able to assess the performance of multi-cell networks implementing a large variety of RSMs under a minimal set of assumptions. Subsequently, we illustrate how this evaluation framework can be used to compare the performance of several well-known RSMs under various fairness requirements and beamforming efficiencies. Our results show that, among the RSMs studied on a simple multi-cell network simulation, NOMA combined with a full reuse policy consistently emerges as the one able to achieve the highest end-users achievable rates under fairness constraints.

Almost exact recovery in noisy semi-supervised learning
K. Avrachenkov and M. Dreveton
Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, 1 - 22, 2024.
[view at publisher]

2024.Graph-based semi-supervised learning methods combine the graph structure and labeled data to classify unlabeled data. In this work, we study the effect of a noisy oracle on classification. In particular, we derive the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator for clustering a degree corrected stochastic block model when a noisy oracle reveals a fraction of the labels. We then propose an algorithm derived from a continuous relaxation of the MAP, and we establish its consistency. Numerical experiments show that our approach achieves promising performance on synthetic and real data sets, even in the case of very noisy labeled data.

Efficiently Escaping Saddle Points for Policy Optimization
M. Khorasani, S. Salehkaleybar, N. Kiyavash, N. He and M. Grossglauser
41th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2025), Rio de Janiro, Brazil, 2025-07-21-2025-07-26.

Policy gradient (PG) is widely used in reinforcement learning due to its scalability and good performance. In recent years, several variance-reduced PG methods have been proposed with a theoretical guarantee of converging to an approximate first-order stationary point (FOSP) with the sample complexity of O(ϵ −3). However, FOSPs could be bad local optima or saddle points. Moreover, these algorithms often use importance sampling (IS) weights which could impair the statistical effectiveness of variance reduction. In this paper, we propose a variance-reduced second-order method that uses second-order information in the form of Hessian vector products (HVP) and converges to an approximate second-order stationary point (SOSP) with sample complexity of Õ(ϵ −3). This rate improves the best-known sample complexity for achieving approximate SOSPs by a factor of O(ϵ −0.5). Moreover, the proposed variance reduction technique bypasses IS weights by using HVP terms. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state of the art and is more robust to changes in random seeds.

Universal Lower Bounds and Optimal Rates: Achieving Minimax Clustering Error in Sub-Exponential Mixture Models
M. Dreveton, A. Gözeten, M. Grossglauser and P. Thiran
The 37th Annual Conference on Learning Theory, Edmonton, Canada, 2024-06-30 - 2024-07-03.

Clustering is a pivotal challenge in unsupervised machine learning and is often investigated through the lens of mixture models. The optimal error rate for recovering cluster labels in Gaussian and sub-Gaussian mixture models involves ad hoc signal-to-noise ratios. Simple iterative algorithms, such as Lloyd's algorithm, attain this optimal error rate. In this paper, we first establish a universal lower bound for the error rate in clustering any mixture model, expressed through Chernoff information, a more versatile measure of model information than signal-to-noise ratios. We then demonstrate that iterative algorithms attain this lower bound in mixture models with sub-exponential tails, notably emphasizing location-scale mixtures featuring Laplace-distributed errors. Additionally, for datasets better modelled by Poisson or Negative Binomial mixtures, we study mixture models whose distributions belong to an exponential family. In such mixtures, we establish that Bregman hard clustering, a variant of Lloyd's algorithm employing a Bregman divergence, is rate optimal.

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