Many data-driven decision problems are formulated using a nominal distribution estimated from historical data, while performance is ultimately determined by a deployment distribution that may be shifted, context-dependent, partially observed, or stress-induced. This tutorial presents modern generative models, particularly flow- and score-based methods, as mathematical tools for constructing decision-relevant distributions. From an operations research perspective, their primary value lies not in unconstrained sample synthesis but in representing and transforming distributions through transport maps, velocity fields, score fields, and guided stochastic dynamics. We present a unified framework based on pushforward maps, continuity, Fokker-Planck equations, Wasserstein geometry, and optimization in probability space. Within this framework, generative models can be used to learn nominal uncertainty, construct stressed or least-favorable distributions for robustness, and produce conditional or posterior distributions under side information and partial observation. We also highlight representative theoretical guarantees, including forward-reverse convergence for iterative flow models, first-order minimax analysis in transport-map space, and error-transfer bounds for posterior sampling with generative priors. The tutorial provides a principled introduction to using generative models for scenario generation, robust decision-making, uncertainty quantification, and related problems under distributional shift.

As regression is a widely studied problem, many methods have been proposed to solve it, each of them often requiring setting different hyper-parameters. Therefore, selecting the proper method for a given application may be very difficult and relies on comparing their performances. Performance is usually measured using various metrics such as Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), or R-squared (R${}^2$). These metrics provide a numerical summary of predictive accuracy by quantifying the difference between predicted and actual values. However, while these metrics are widely used in the literature for summarizing model performance and useful to distinguish between models performing poorly and well, they often aggregate too much information. This article addresses these limitations by introducing a novel visualization approach that highlights key aspects of regression model performance. The proposed method builds upon three main contributions: (1) considering the residuals in a 2D space, which allows for simultaneous evaluation of errors from two models, (2) leveraging the Mahalanobis distance to account for correlations and differences in scale within the data, and (3) employing a colormap to visualize the percentile-based distribution of errors, making it easier to identify dense regions and outliers. By graphically representing the distribution of errors and their correlations, this approach provides a more detailed and comprehensive view of model performance, enabling users to uncover patterns that traditional aggregate metrics may obscure. The proposed visualization method facilitates a deeper understanding of regression model performance differences and error distributions, enhancing the evaluation and comparison process.

A London doctor controlled robotic surgical arms in Gibraltar to perform prostate cancer telesurgery in near real time from 1,500 miles away.

We also study the more general case of an additional entropy regularizer.

Inference via knowledge compilation has also been used for many applications in neuro-symbolic AI,suchasconstrained generation [2,54]andneural logic programming [34,28].

Adapting to dynamic data distributions is a practical yet challenging task.

Surgical video-language pretraining (VLP) faces unique challenges due to the knowledge domain gap and the scarcity of multi-modal data.

We leverage these advantages to derive a new algorithm Factor Relaxation with Latent Coupling (FRLC), which uses coordinate mirror descent to compute the LC factorization.

Recent works (Chen et al., 2022; Suzuki et al., 2023b) have demonstrated In this work, we improve the dependence on logarithmic Sobolev inequality (LSI) constants in their particle approximation errors which can exponentially deteriorate with the regularization coefficient. One may consider adding Gaussian noise to the gradient descent to make the method more stable.