arXiv:2608. 08770v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion models are increasingly used as controllable samplers, whose generations can be steered at inference time according to a chosen reward function.
By Samuel Howard, Nikolas N\"usken
This paper addresses model-free continuous-time mean-field control in a setting where the population dynamics evolve continuously according to an unknown McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equation, while only discrete-time transition data are available. In the model-based formulation, policy evaluation is naturally described by a stationary Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation on $\mathcal P_2(\mathbb R^d)$, but this equation involves the drift and diffusion coefficients of the controlled McKean-Vlasov dynamics, which are not identifiable when only discrete-time data are available.
Diffusion models are increasingly used as controllable samplers, whose generations can be steered at inference time according to a chosen reward function. While such rewards are typically defined on individual samples, for many applications it is desirable to steer according to distribution-level rewards, for example to calibrate with population-level information or to encourage diversity.
arXiv:2606. 26498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper addresses model-free continuous-time mean-field control in a setting where the population dynamics evolve continuously according to an unknown McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equation, while only discrete-time transition data are available.
By Erhan Bayraktar, Martin Hernandez, Qinxin Yan, Yuhua Zhu
arXiv:2606. 14289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Population-based and distributional optimization methods, from evolution strategies and consensus-based optimization to covariance-matrix adaptation and stochastic gradient methods viewed as distributional dynamics, are widely used for nonconvex or black-box problems, yet their convergence analyses remain fragmented across algorithm-specific techniques.
By Pekka Malo, Lauri Viitasaari, Patrik Nummi, Antti Suominen, Ankur Sinha, Olli Tahvonen
arXiv:2610.01034v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Bayesian inference increasingly uses informative but implicit priors represented only by samples, such as historical ensembles, simulator outputs, an...
By Hoang Phuc Hau Luu, Marcelo Hartmann, Zhongjian Wang