Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Asia


Diffused Task-Agnostic Milestone Planner

Neural Information Processing Systems

Addressing decision-making problems using sequence modeling to predict future trajectories shows promising results in recent years. In this paper, we take a step further to leverage the sequence predictive method in wider areas such as long-term planning, vision-based control, and multi-task decision-making. To this end, we propose a method to utilize a diffusion-based generative sequence model to plan a series of milestones in a latent space and to have an agent to follow the milestones to accomplish a given task. The proposed method can learn control-relevant, low-dimensional latent representations of milestones, which makes it possible to efficiently perform long-term planning and vision-based control. Furthermore, our approach exploits generation flexibility of the diffusion model, which makes it possible to plan diverse trajectories for multi-task decision-making. We demonstrate the proposed method across offline reinforcement learning (RL) benchmarks and an visual manipulation environment. The results show that our approach outperforms offline RL methods in solving long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks and multi-task problems, while also achieving the state-of-the-art performance on the most challenging vision-based manipulation benchmark.



Steve Rosenberg: Kremlin's tightening grip on internet fuels public discontent

BBC News

Near the Kremlin several dozen people are queuing outside the presidential administration office. They've come to submit petitions calling on President Vladimir Putin to end a crackdown on the internet. Russian authorities have been tightening control of the country's cyber space. Access to global messaging apps has been restricted and there are widespread disruptions to, even shutdowns of, mobile internet. Petitioning the president is legal.





SoftBank prepares to manufacture batteries for AI data centers

The Japan Times

SoftBank Group's mobile unit plans to transform part of its factory in Osaka Prefecture into one of Japan's biggest production lines for large-scale batteries in an ambitious attempt at powering its own artificial intelligence data centers. SoftBank Corp. aims to bring that production online within the next five years, according to people familiar with the matter. They asked not to be named as deliberations remain private. After SoftBank executives mulled different purposes for the plant in the city of Sakai, including robotics manufacturing, they decided to pursue energy. The Tokyo-based group led by Masayoshi Son is one of the world's foremost supporters of AI, having committed hundreds of billions of dollars to investment in data centers, cloud services and bets on startups like OpenAI.


A new survey reveals the MLB's most foul-mouthed fanbase

FOX News

Sherrone Moore accuser Paige Shiver speaks out in new interview: he'had complete control over me' Megan Rapinoe calls on traditional WNBA media to be replaced with those who'understand queer culture' The NFL Draft continues to be one of the worst'sporting events' of the year New Russini-Vrabel photos raise ESPN conflict questions but the network won't answer them ESPN's Mad Dog Russo melts down over'U-S-A' chants at the RBC Heritage A piece of the UFC White House event's setup is sitting in Pennsylvania Amish country Viral Ottawa Senators fan blamed for team's 0-2 playoff start banished to Taiwan'First Take' host acts disgusted when she has to cover Vrabel-Russini drama Gen Jack Keane: You can't believe anything Iran says until it executes Will Cain: Everything about Hasan Piker is'communism wrapped in a Che Guevara T-shirt' Trump: 'Can I finish my question, wise guy?' DHS attorney speaks out after UCLA protest chaos and claims he received'death threats' Trump: Why would I use a nuclear weapon? A Vegas Insider study combed through all 30 MLB teams' subreddits to find which fanbases swear the most online When you start thinking about which MLB teams' fanbases have the filthiest mouths, there's a good chance a few cities instantly jump to mind. But a new survey from Vegas Insider has found the most foul-mouthed fanbases in the MLB, and the top team might surprise you a little at first... and then it will make total sense. A new survey has found that Athletics fans are the most foul-mouthed in Major League Baseball. Technically, a franchise that played in Philadelphia at one point, but is now in Sacramento limbonow in Sacramento limbo ahead of a move to Vegas: the Athletics.


CLT-Optimal Parameter Error Bounds for Linear System Identification

arXiv.org Machine Learning

There has been remarkable progress over the past decade in establishing finite-sample, non-asymptotic bounds on recovering unknown system parameters from observed system behavior. Surprisingly, however, we show that the current state-of-the-art bounds do not accurately capture the statistical complexity of system identification, even in the most fundamental setting of estimating a discrete-time linear dynamical system (LDS) via ordinary least-squares regression (OLS). Specifically, we utilize asymptotic normality to identify classes of problem instances for which current bounds overstate the squared parameter error, in both spectral and Frobenius norm, by a factor of the state-dimension of the system. Informed by this discrepancy, we then sharpen the OLS parameter error bounds via a novel second-order decomposition of the parameter error, where crucially the lower-order term is a matrix-valued martingale that we show correctly captures the CLT scaling. From our analysis we obtain finite-sample bounds for both (i) stable systems and (ii) the many-trajectories setting that match the instance-specific optimal rates up to constant factors in Frobenius norm, and polylogarithmic state-dimension factors in spectral norm.


The Sample Complexity of Multicalibration

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study the minimax sample complexity of multicalibration in the batch setting. A learner observes $n$ i.i.d. samples from an unknown distribution and must output a (possibly randomized) predictor whose population multicalibration error, measured by Expected Calibration Error (ECE), is at most $\varepsilon$ with respect to a given family of groups. For every fixed $κ> 0$, in the regime $|G|\le \varepsilon^{-κ}$, we prove that $\widetildeΘ(\varepsilon^{-3})$ samples are necessary and sufficient, up to polylogarithmic factors. The lower bound holds even for randomized predictors, and the upper bound is realized by a randomized predictor obtained via an online-to-batch reduction. This separates the sample complexity of multicalibration from that of marginal calibration, which scales as $\widetildeΘ(\varepsilon^{-2})$, and shows that mean-ECE multicalibration is as difficult in the batch setting as it is in the online setting, in contrast to marginal calibration which is strictly more difficult in the online setting. In contrast we observe that for $κ= 0$, the sample complexity of multicalibration remains $\widetildeΘ(\varepsilon^{-2})$ exhibiting a sharp threshold phenomenon. More generally, we establish matching upper and lower bounds, up to polylogarithmic factors, for a weighted $L_p$ multicalibration metric for all $1 \le p \le 2$, with optimal exponent $3/p$. We also extend the lower-bound template to a regular class of elicitable properties, and combine it with the online upper bounds of Hu et al. (2025) to obtain matching bounds for calibrating properties including expectiles and bounded-density quantiles.