In this work, we study risk-aware reinforcement learning for quadrupedal locomotion. Our approach trains a family of risk-conditioned policies using a Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) constrained policy optimization technique that provides improved stability and sample efficiency. At deployment, we adaptively select the best performing policy from the family of policies using a multi-armed bandit framework that uses only observed episodic returns, without any privileged environment information, and adapts to unknown conditions on the fly. Hence, we train quadrupedal locomotion policies at various levels of robustness using CVaR and adaptively select the desired level of robustness online to ensure performance in unknown environments. We evaluate our method in simulation across eight unseen settings (by changing dynamics, contacts, sensing noise, and terrain) and on a Unitree Go2 robot in previously unseen terrains. Our risk-aware policy attains nearly twice the mean and tail performance in unseen environments compared to other baselines and our bandit-based adaptation selects the best-performing risk-aware policy in unknown terrain within two minutes of operation.

Column generation and branch-and-price are leading methods for large-scale exact optimization. Column generation iterates between solving a master problem and a pricing problem. The master problem is a linear program, which can be solved using a generic solver. The pricing problem is highly dependent on the application but is usually discrete. Due to the difficulty of discrete optimization, high-performance column generation often relies on a custom pricing algorithm built specifically to exploit the problem's structure. This bespoke nature of the pricing solver prevents the reuse of components for other applications. We show that domain-independent dynamic programming, a software package for modeling and solving arbitrary dynamic programs, can be used as a generic pricing solver. We develop basic implementations of branch-and-price with pricing by domain-independent dynamic programming and show that they outperform a world-leading solver on static mixed integer programming formulations for seven problem classes.

Abstract--Immersive virtual reality (VR) applications impose stringent requirements on latency, energy efficiency, and computational resources, particularly in multi-user interactive scenarios. T o address these challenges, we introduce the concept of spatial computing communications (SCC), a framework designed to meet the latency and energy demands of multi-user VR over distributed mobile edge computing (MEC) networks. SCC jointly represents the physical space, defined by users and base stations, and the virtual space, representing shared immersive environments, using a probabilistic model of user dynamics and resource requirements. The resource deployment task is then formulated as a multi-objective combinatorial optimization (MOCO) problem that simultaneously minimizes system latency and energy consumption across distributed MEC resources. T o solve this problem, we propose MO-CMPO, a multi-objective consistency model with policy optimization that integrates supervised learning and reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning guided by preference weights. Leveraging a sparse graph neural network (GNN), MO-CMPO efficiently generates Pareto-optimal solutions. Simulations with real-world New Radio base station datasets demonstrate that MO-CMPO achieves superior hypervolume performance and significantly lower inference latency than baseline methods. Furthermore, the analysis reveals practical deployment patterns: latency-oriented solutions favor local MEC execution to reduce transmission delay, while energy-oriented solutions minimize redundant placements to save energy.

We study a two-sided market, wherein, price-sensitive heterogeneous customers and servers arrive and join their respective queues. A compatible customer-server pair can then be matched by the platform, at which point, they leave the system. Our objective is to design pricing and matching algorithms that maximize the platform's profit, while maintaining reasonable queue lengths. As the demand and supply curves governing the price-dependent arrival rates may not be known in practice, we design a novel online-learning-based pricing policy and establish its near-optimality. In particular, we prove a tradeoff among three performance metrics: $\tilde{O}(T^{1-γ})$ regret, $\tilde{O}(T^{γ/2})$ average queue length, and $\tilde{O}(T^γ)$ maximum queue length for $γ\in (0, 1/6]$, significantly improving over existing results [1]. Moreover, barring the permissible range of $γ$, we show that this trade-off between regret and average queue length is optimal up to logarithmic factors under a class of policies, matching the optimal one as in [2] which assumes the demand and supply curves to be known. Our proposed policy has two noteworthy features: a dynamic component that optimizes the tradeoff between low regret and small queue lengths; and a probabilistic component that resolves the tension between obtaining useful samples for fast learning and maintaining small queue lengths.

Power grids increasingly need real-time situational awareness under the ever-evolving cyberthreat landscape. Advances in snapshot-based system identification approaches have enabled accurately estimating states and topology from a snapshot of measurement data, under random bad data and topology errors. However, modern interactive, targeted false data can stay undetectable to these methods, and significantly compromise estimation accuracy. This work advances system identification that combines snapshot-based method with time-series model via Bayesian Integration, to advance cyber resiliency against both random and targeted false data. Using a distance-based time-series model, this work can leverage historical data of different distributions induced by changes in grid topology and other settings. The normal system behavior captured from historical data is integrated into system identification through a Bayesian treatment, to make solutions robust to targeted false data. We experiment on mixed random anomalies (bad data, topology error) and targeted false data injection attack (FDIA) to demonstrate our method's 1) cyber resilience: achieving over 70% reduction in estimation error under FDIA; 2) anomalous data identification: being able to alarm and locate anomalous data; 3) almost linear scalability: achieving comparable speed with the snapshot-based baseline, both taking <1min per time tick on the large 2,383-bus system using a laptop CPU.

Many video workflows benefit from a mixture of user controls with varying granularity, from exact 4D object trajectories and camera paths to coarse text prompts, while existing video generative models are typically trained for fixed input formats. We develop Ctrl-VI, a video synthesis method that addresses this need and generates samples with high controllability for specified elements while maintaining diversity for under-specified ones. We cast the task as variational inference to approximate a composed distribution, leveraging multiple video generation backbones to account for all task constraints collectively. To address the optimization challenge, we break down the problem into step-wise KL divergence minimization over an annealed sequence of distributions, and further propose a context-conditioned factorization technique that reduces modes in the solution space to circumvent local optima. Experiments suggest that our method produces samples with improved controllability, diversity, and 3D consistency compared to prior works.

Adapting to diverse user needs at test time is a key challenge in controllable multi-objective generation. Existing methods are insufficient: merging-based approaches provide indirect, suboptimal control at the parameter level, often disregarding the impacts of multiple objectives. While decoding-based guidance is more direct, it typically requires aggregating logits from multiple expert models, incurring significant space overhead and relying heavily on individual model capacity. To address these issues, we introduce Merge-And-GuidE (MAGE), a two-stage framework that leverages model merging for guided decoding. We first identify a critical compatibility problem between the guidance and base models. In Stage 1, MAGE resolves this by dynamically constructing a more robust base model, merging a series of backbone models that account for multiple objectives. In Stage 2, we merge explicit and implicit value models into a unified guidance proxy, which then steers the decoding of the base model from Stage 1. Our analysis empirically validates Linear Mode Connectivity (LMC) in value models, explores the relationship between model merging and prediction ensembling, and demonstrates the enhanced controllability afforded by our approach. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing approaches, achieving superior controllability, Pareto-optimal performance, and enhanced adaptability.

Many common estimators in machine learning and causal inference are linear smoothers, where the prediction is a weighted average of the training outcomes. Some estimators, such as ordinary least squares and kernel ridge regression, allow for arbitrarily negative weights, which improve feature imbalance but often at the cost of increased dependence on parametric modeling assumptions and higher variance. By contrast, estimators like importance weighting and random forests (sometimes implicitly) restrict weights to be non-negative, reducing dependence on parametric modeling and variance at the cost of worse imbalance. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that directly penalizes the level of extrapolation, replacing the current practice of a hard non-negativity constraint with a soft constraint and corresponding hyperparameter. We derive a worst-case extrapolation error bound and introduce a novel "bias-bias-variance" tradeoff, encompassing biases due to feature imbalance, model misspecification, and estimator variance; this tradeoff is especially pronounced in high dimensions, particularly when positivity is poor. We then develop an optimization procedure that regularizes this bound while minimizing imbalance and outline how to use this approach as a sensitivity analysis for dependence on parametric modeling assumptions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through synthetic experiments and a real-world application, involving the generalization of randomized controlled trial estimates to a target population of interest.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective in incentivizing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), but suffers from severe efficiency challenges due to its trial-and-error nature. While the common practice employs supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a warm-up stage for RL, this decoupled two-stage approach suffers from catastrophic forgetting: second-stage RL gradually loses SFT-acquired behaviors and inefficiently explores new patterns. This study introduces a novel method for learning reasoning models that employs bilevel optimization to facilitate better cooperation between these training paradigms. By conditioning the SFT objective on the optimal RL policy, our approach enables SFT to meta-learn how to guide RL's optimization process. During training, the lower level performs RL updates while simultaneously receiving SFT supervision, and the upper level explicitly maximizes the cooperative gain-the performance advantage of joint SFT-RL training over RL alone. Empirical evaluations on five reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms baselines and achieves a better balance between effectiveness and efficiency.

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Yet traditional first-order optimizers such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and Adam incur prohibitive memory and computational costs that scale poorly with model size. In this paper, we investigate zero-order (ZO) optimization methods as a memory- and compute-efficient alternative, particularly in the context of parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques like LoRA. We propose $\texttt{JAGUAR SignSGD}$, a ZO momentum-based algorithm that extends ZO SignSGD, requiring the same number of parameters as the standard ZO SGD and only $\mathcal{O}(1)$ function evaluations per iteration. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to establish rigorous convergence guarantees for SignSGD in the stochastic ZO case. We further propose $\texttt{JAGUAR Muon}$, a novel ZO extension of the Muon optimizer that leverages the matrix structure of model parameters, and we provide its convergence rate under arbitrary stochastic noise. Through extensive experiments on challenging LLM fine-tuning benchmarks, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithms meet or exceed the convergence quality of standard first-order methods, achieving significant memory reduction. Our theoretical and empirical results establish new ZO optimization methods as a practical and theoretically grounded approach for resource-constrained LLM adaptation. Our code is available at https://github.com/brain-mmo-lab/ZO_LLM