The paper investigates preference elicitation under the Bradley‑Terry‑Luce model, focusing on estimating an unknown partworth vector from pairwise queries that satisfy a joint identifiability condition. It derives minimax lower bounds and shows that the canonical maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) exists, is unique, and achieves near‑optimal error rates once the sample size exceeds a design‑dependent threshold, without requiring compactness constraints or external regularizers. The analysis decomposes the estimation error into a linear stochastic term, a second‑order bias, and a higher‑order remainder, providing a unified non‑asymptotic theory for parametric utility elicitation.
By Yicheng Li, Huifu Xu
arXiv:2609.40193v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We establish near-linear accuracy bounds for the classical Moreau--Yosida unadjusted Langevin algorithm (MYULA). The target is $\pi\propto e^{-f-g}$, w...
By Yuchen Xin, Zhihua Zhang
arXiv:2609. 20749v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Location estimation exhibits markedly different finite-sample behavior across noise distributions: regular families typically yield root-\(n\) rates, whereas compactly supported laws may admit faster, boundary-driven rates.
By Qiaosen Wang, Chao Gao
arXiv:2602. 04272v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Importance-Weighted Evidence Lower Bound (IW-ELBO) has emerged as an effective objective for variational inference (VI), tightening the standard ELBO and mitigating the mode-seeking behaviour.
By Peiwen Jiang, Takuo Matsubara, Minh-Ngoc Tran
arXiv:2201. 01973v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The problem of linear predictions has been extensively studied for the past century under pretty generalized frameworks.
By Saptarshi Chakraborty, Debolina Paul, Swagatam Das
The paper investigates quantile distributional policy evaluation by approximating the return distribution under a policy with a quantile Bellman fixed point. It constructs an estimator from an empirical Markov decision process and derives non‑asymptotic error bounds in Wasserstein distances, achieving root‑n rates that are independent of the quantile resolution for a wide range of Wasserstein orders. The authors also characterize the exact local asymptotic minimax risk and show that their estimator attains this optimal rate, while examining how the risk depends on resolution in simple state‑space examples.
By Zijie Cheng, Zhihua Zhang
arXiv:2604. 18546v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a distributionally robust approach to risk-sensitive estimation of an unknown signal x from an observed signal y.
By Feras Al Taha, Eilyan Bitar
arXiv:2610.19588v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We consider the problem of estimating the background intensity of a Hawkes process when the triggering mechanism is known, treating the background as...
By Isaias Banales, Arturo Jaramillo
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:2610.07228v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Natural gradient descent (NGD) underlies common methods in ML. For dually flat families, idealized NGD on the forward Kullback--Leibler objective fol...
By Guni Sharon, Alan Kuhnle
arXiv:2610. 31431v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm (ULA) is widely used for high-dimensional Bayesian inference.
By Yuansi Chen, Francesco Pedrotti, Peter A. Whalley
arXiv:2609. 38412v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a novel local-polynomial estimator of the ratio $r=f/g$ of two $d$-dimensional densities $f$ and $g$, from which independent samples are available.
By Hajo Holzmann, Alexander Meister