arXiv Machine Learning

A Transport-Based Geometry of Belief-Cost

arXiv:2606. 21585v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A finite agent, a machine's digital twin or any bounded reasoner, infers a fixed and noisy world through finite sensors, so its coherent output is a belief: a probability density over states (the Bayes posterior).

arXiv AI
Jun 8

A Temporal Spatial Minimax Rate for Smoothly-Varying Distributions in Wasserstein Space

arXiv:2606. 07325v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the minimax rate of estimating a future value $\mu_{t_n+h}$ of a curve $t\mapsto\mu_t$ in the $2$-Wasserstein space $\mathcal{P}_2(\mathbb{R}^d)$ from finitely many noisy snapshots of its past, under an adiabatic bound $\|\nabla_t^k v\|\le\varepsilon$ on the $k$-th covariant derivative of the velocity field.

By Munsik Kim
arXiv AI
Aug 26

The Shadow Price of Intelligence: Quality Degradation in LLM Inference as a Supply Chain Problem

The paper argues that large language model (LLM) providers, constrained by compute, often degrade service during congestion by routing queries to smaller models, cutting reasoning effort, or truncating context. It shows that this practice misrepresents costs because degraded answers can fail, leading to retries that inflate traffic or churn that erodes lifetime value. By modeling inference allocation with newsvendor, retry, and queueing frameworks, the authors derive a ‘shadow price of intelligence’ that quantifies the marginal value of each query, revealing that throttling under congestion acts as a demand lever rather than a cost lever.

By Elioth Sanabria
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Structured Approximations of Measures

arXiv:2310. 09149v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the approximation of probability measures in the Wasserstein-$p$ distance by structured classes of approximators, motivated by applications in imaging, machine learning, and physical measurement under sensor constraints.

By Keaton Hamm, Varun Khurana
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Bilateral Trade Under Heavy-Tailed Valuations: Minimax Regret without a Variance Bound

The paper studies contextual bilateral trade with full feedback, showing that action-independent observations eliminate the usual polynomial adaptation penalty seen in heavy-tailed bandits. It presents fully parameter-free algorithms that achieve oracle minimax regret rates without knowing the moment order or scale, and derives new regret bounds for both parametric and nonparametric settings. The key technical insight is a paired squared‑loss statistic whose noise cancels, enabling model selection and yielding regret rates that interpolate between classical nonparametric and linear extremes.

By Hangyi Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Optimal Recovery Meets Bayesian Learning: Where Worst-Case Bounds Pay Off

The paper shows that Worst‑Case Optimal Recovery (OR) and Bayesian learning solve the same Gaussian‑quadratic‑Hilbert problems, linking the radius of information to a nugget‑optimized Gaussian process posterior variance. It evaluates three Bayesian systems, demonstrating that OR can outperform Bayesian methods in certain calibration and reproducibility metrics, yet split‑conformal and other approaches can beat OR in interval scoring, especially under covariate shift. The authors propose matching the guarantee tool to the data regime and auditing that regime first.

By Gordei Verbii