Education
Fast Training of Mixture-of-Experts for Time Series Forecasting via Expert Loss Integration
Mahtout, Btissame El, Ziel, Florian
We propose a novel adaptive Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework for time series forecasting that enhances expert specialization by incorporating expert-specific loss information directly into the training process. Notably, the overall objective comprises the base forecasting loss and expert-specific losses, allowing expert-level prediction errors to jointly shape training alongside the global forecasting loss. This framework is further combined with a partial online learning strategy, enabling incremental updates of both the gating mechanism and expert parameters. This approach significantly reduces computational cost by eliminating the need for repeated full model retraining. By integrating expert-level loss awareness with efficient online optimization, the proposed method achieves improved learning efficiency while maintaining strong predictive performance. Empirical results across economic, tourism, and energy datasets with varying frequencies demonstrate that the proposed approach generally outperforms both statistical methods and state-of-the-art neural network models, such as Transformers and WaveNet, in forecasting accuracy and computational efficiency. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the expert-specific loss integration strategy, highlighting its contribution to enhancing predictive performance.
Game teaches kids programming basics without screens
Texico's analog brain games use playing cards, toy train tracks, and scrap paper. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. The Japanese company's games can help users learn the principles of coding with less screentime. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Parents around the world are responding to growing research showing that excessive screen time, especially for young children, may have negative cognitive effects .
Decentralized Diffusion Policy Learning for Enhanced Exploration in Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
Zhang, Yuyang, Balim, Haldun, Li, Na
Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) involves complex agent interactions and requires effective exploration strategies. A prominent class of MARL algorithms, decentralized softmax policy gradient (DecSPG), addresses this through energy-based policy updates. In practice, however, such energy-based policies are intractable to maintain and are commonly projected onto the Gaussian policy class. In this work, we show that the limited expressiveness of Gaussian policies severely hinders exploration in DecSPG, and this limitation worsens as the number of agents grows. To address this issue, we propose decentralized diffusion policy learning (DDPL), which parameterizes each agent's policy with a denoising diffusion probabilistic model, an expressive generative model that captures multi-modal action distributions for enhanced exploration. DDPL enables efficient online training of diffusion policies via importance sampling score matching (ISSM), a novel training method with theoretical guarantee. We evaluate DDPL on representative continuous-action MARL benchmarks, including multi-agent particle environment, multi-agent MuJoCo, IsaacLab, and JAX-reimplemented StarCraft multi-agent challenge, and observe consistently improved performance.
POETS: Uncertainty-Aware LLM Optimization via Compute-Efficient Policy Ensembles
Menet, Nicolas, Krause, Andreas, Rahimi, Abbas
Balancing exploration and exploitation is a core challenge in sequential decision-making and black-box optimization. We introduce POETS ($\textbf{Po}$licy $\textbf{E}$nsembles for $\textbf{T}$hompson $\textbf{S}$ampling), a novel framework that bridges uncertainty quantification and policy optimization. Our approach is grounded in the insight that policies trained with Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization implicitly encode an underlying reward function. Building on this, POETS bypasses the complex, nested process of training an uncertainty-aware reward model and separately fitting a policy to this model. Instead, we directly train a policy ensemble to capture epistemic uncertainty by matching implicitly encoded reward functions to online, bootstrapped data. To overcome the prohibitive compute and memory constraints of ensembling Large Language Models (LLMs), POETS utilizes an efficient architecture: the ensemble shares a pre-trained backbone while maintaining diversity through independent Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) branches. Theoretically, we prove that POETS implicitly conducts KL-regularized Thompson sampling and thus inherits strong cumulative regret bounds of ${\mathcal O}(\sqrt{T ฮณ_T})$. Empirically, we demonstrate that POETS achieves state-of-the-art sample efficiency across diverse scientific discovery domains, including protein search and quantum circuit design. Furthermore, it improves the optimization trajectories of reinforcement learning, proving particularly robust in off-policy settings with experience replay or in small dataset regimes.
Characterizing and Correcting Effective Target Shift in Online Learning
Online learning from a stream of data is a defining feature of intelligence, yet modern machine learning systems often struggle in this setting, especially under distributional shift. To understand its basic properties, we study the relationship between online and offline learning in the context of kernel regression. We derive a closed-form expression for the function learned by online kernel regression, revealing that online kernel regression is equivalent to offline regression with shifted, inaccurate target outputs. Conversely, we show that by compensating for this effective shift in the teaching signal through target correction, online kernel-based learning can provably learn the same predictor as its offline counterpart. We derive both a closed-form expression for this target correction and an iterative form that can be applied sequentially. Applying this framework to image classification tasks on CIFAR-10 and CORe50, we show that online stochastic gradient descent with iteratively corrected targets outperforms learning with the true targets in continual learning settings. This work therefore provides a basic framework for analyzing and improving online learning in non-stationary environments.
I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment Micah Nathan
I knew my writing students were using AI. It's what's lost when we surrender the struggle to translate thought into words I have been teaching fiction writing at MIT since 2017. Mark what works and what doesn't - underline great sentences, flag clunky syntax, gaps in logic and unrealistic dialogue. Ask yourself: does the story work? Answer in a signed letter to the author, attached to their story.
The first playgrounds were for adults, not kids
Early playgrounds were more about fitness than fun--and children didn't enter the equation for decades. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Playgrounds have never been just fun and games. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. You can learn a lot about a society from the way they raise children.
Bandit Learning in General Open Multi-agent Systems
Recent developments in digital platforms have highlighted the prevalence of open systems, where agents can arrive and depart over time. While bandit learning in open systems has recently received initial attention, existing work imposes structural assumptions that are frequently violated in practice. A learning paradigm for general open systems creates fresh challenges: newly arriving agents induce endogenous non-stationarity; agent patterns determine how quickly information accumulates; and new agents make regret scale further with the time horizon. To this end, we formulate a unified open-system bandit problem with general dynamics, including heterogeneous rewards and general agent patterns. We introduce new concepts to capture the inherent complexities: the \emph{pre-training degree} of new agents quantifies how much information an agent carries upon entry, \emph{stability} measures the impact of new agents on the system, and \emph{global dynamic regret} compares the cumulative expected reward of all active agents with that of the varying optimal arms. We develop certified global-UCB learning methodologies with provable guarantees. Our regret bounds reveal that entry uncertainty enters linearly via the pre-training degree, while in stable regimes, regret is governed by the time needed to identify a persistent optimal arm, as well as by the agent patterns. We further show that these dependencies are tight via lower bounds in hard instances.
When Does Trimming Help Conformal Prediction? A Retained-Law Diagnostic under Calibration Contamination
Trimming suspicious calibration points is a common response to contamination in conformal prediction. Its effect on clean-target coverage, however, is governed by the retained law induced by trimming, not by the contamination level alone. We analyse fixed-threshold trimming as conditioning rather than purification. It replaces the contaminated calibration law with a retained law, reducing clean-target coverage to a one-dimensional score-CDF transfer problem with an exact finite-sample identity. A componentwise bound on the transfer gap gives a population-level diagnostic. This separates a clean-side covariance cost from a retained-contamination cost, governed by the dirty-to-clean retention ratio. Trimming helps when the anomaly score separates retention probabilities while remaining score-neutral on the clean population. Otherwise, it cannot substantially reduce contamination through the retained mixture coefficient. We also give finite-sample certificate templates that provide numerical guarantees under independent audit.
White House calls out Newsom as California girls' track and field controversy reignites
Megan Rapinoe, in a shock to no one, backs Angel Reese skipping interviews as'taking power back' Here's why the coaches association's 24-team College Football Playoff could ruin the sport Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown tells ESPN's Stephen A Smith to'be quiet and retire' President Trump on $1,000 World Cup ticket prices: 'I wouldn't pay it either, to be honest' Pirates vs. Diamondbacks betting preview targets the under as both offenses go cold in series Former LSU coach Brian Kelly uses AI to prepare for job interviews, proving he's just like the rest of us Newsom office source responds to planned protest against trans athlete at state playoff girls' track meet US waits for Iran's response on peace proposal Authorities try to'connect the dots' on hantavirus infections Jesse Watters: Spencer Pratt is a'charismatic, common-sense populist' Greg Gutfeld: Dana White laughs off the'toxic masculinity thing' Iranians are fearful of facing the regime's frustration and anger after the war, activist says OutKick White House calls out Newsom as California girls' track and field controversy reignites Spokeswoman called Newsom'a truly sick individual who has no regard for fairness, dignity, and respect' Jurupa Valley High School graduate Hadeel Hazameh responded to the news that the Trump administration has launched a Title IX investigation into her district over an incident involving trans volleyball teammate, which has resulted in her graduating early and leaving her sports career behind. President Donald Trump's White House has officially put California Gov. Gavin Newsom on notice as a controversial girls' track and field postseason is set to begin this weekend. A White House spokesperson called out Newsom in a statement to Fox News Digital as his state continues to allow biological male trans athletes to compete in girls' high school sports. Gavin Newscum is a truly sick individual who has no regard for fairness, dignity, and respect. If he did, he wouldn't allow men to compete in women's sports, limiting women's opportunities and jeopardizing their health and safety.