arXiv:2511. 01064v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Variational inference (VI) approximates a target density $p$ by the best match $q$ in a family of tractable distributions.
By Charles C. Margossian, Isaac E. Rankin, Lawrence K. Saul
The paper introduces a new variational inference framework that uses tangent transformations to handle strongly super‑Gaussian likelihoods across a wide range of probability models. By constructing tangent minorants of the log‑likelihood through convex duality, the method achieves conjugacy with Gaussian priors, enabling tractable inference where traditional approaches struggle. The authors provide algorithmic convergence guarantees and near‑parametric risk bounds, and demonstrate superior scalability and accuracy on both simulated and real‑world datasets compared to existing variational algorithms.
By Somjit Roy, Pritam Dey, Debdeep Pati, Bani K. Mallick
arXiv:2608. 11544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose CVaR-penalized Generative Particle Algorithm (CVaR-GPA), a robust, tail-agnostic algorithm for fine-tuning generative models to learn heavy-tailed distributions and capture extreme events, requiring no prior knowledge or estimation of the target's tail characteristics.
By Thejani Gamage, Hyemin Gu, Zhizhen Zhang, Ziyu Chen, Markos Katsoulakis, Luc Rey-Bellet
The paper introduces a Bethe Lagrangian formulation of expected free energy (EFE) that preserves a Kullback–Leibler structure, enabling message‑passing inference. By imposing an information constraint—requiring the mutual information between future observations, states, and parameters given actions to be at least the entropy of the goal prior—the authors recover the standard EFE solution at a specific Karush‑Kuhn‑Tucker multiplier. They analyze how varying this multiplier transitions the agent’s epistemic drive through inactive, interior, and saturated regimes, and benchmark the constrained Bethe agent against EFE and Q‑MDP on three tasks.
By Wouter M. Kouw
arXiv:2509. 20114v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study \emph{online episodic Constrained Markov Decision Processes} (CMDPs) under both stochastic and adversarial constraints.
By Francesco Emanuele Stradi, Eleonora Fidelia Chiefari, Matteo Castiglioni, Alberto Marchesi, Nicola Gatti
arXiv:2608. 06182v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study stochastic extragradient (SEG) methods for solving monotone variational inequality problems (VIPs) over a feasible set.
By TaeHo Yoon, Nicolas Loizou
arXiv:2609. 01166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The present research is devoted to the nonparametric estimation of a density-dependent drift coefficient in a multivariate McKean--Vlasov diffusion from independent observations at a common time, as well as the stationary density.
By Denis Belomestny, Ekaterina Morozova
arXiv:2607. 02003v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although neural networks are remarkably effective, their underlying optimization principles remain theoretically elusive, often characterized by non-convex landscapes and stochastic heuristics.
By Matej Benko, Pierre Bousquet, Iwona Chlebicka, B{\l}a\.zej Miasojedow
arXiv:2411. 15067v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate proximal descent methods, inspired by the minimizing movement scheme introduced by Jordan, Kinderlehrer and Otto, for optimizing entropy-regularized functionals on the Wasserstein space.
By Razvan-Andrei Lascu, Mateusz B. Majka, David \v{S}i\v{s}ka, {\L}ukasz Szpruch
arXiv:2606. 16257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling from high-dimensional, non-log-concave distributions with unnormalized densities is a fundamental challenge in machine learning, particularly when the exact gradient of the potential is unavailable and must be approximated via stochastic gradients that exhibit high variance under a fixed budget of gradient computations per iteration.
By M. Berk Sahin, Ahmet Ege Tanriverdi, Behzad Sharif, Abolfazl Hashemi
We study the problem of \emph{adversarially robust} PAC learning. In this framework, the learner observes independent samples from an unknown distribution over $\mathcal{X} \times \{0,1\}$, as in clas...
arXiv:2609.08380v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We study the stochastic first-order oracle complexity for constrained or regularized convex-concave min-max optimization and stochastic monotone vari...
By Ahmet Alacaoglu