With the growing demand for Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks in sensitive applications, such as urban monitoring, emergency response, and secure sensing, ensuring reliable connectivity and covert communication has become increasingly vital. However, dynamic mobility and exposure risks pose significant challenges. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a self-organizing UAV network framework combining Graph Diffusion-based Policy Optimization (GDPO) with a Stackelberg Game (SG)-based incentive mechanism. The GDPO method uses generative AI to dynamically generate sparse but well-connected topologies, enabling flexible adaptation to changing node distributions and Ground User (GU) demands. Meanwhile, the Stackelberg Game (SG)-based incentive mechanism guides self-interested UAVs to choose relay behaviors and neighbor links that support cooperation and enhance covert communication. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of model convergence, topology generation quality, and enhancement of covert communication performance.

Biclustering is the analog of clustering on a bipartite graph. Existent methods infer biclusters through local search strategies that find one cluster at a time; a common technique is to update the row memberships based on the current column memberships, and vice versa. We propose a biclustering algorithm that maximizes a global objective function using message passing. Our objective function closely approximates a general likelihood function, separating a cluster size penalty term into row-and column-count penalties. Because we use a global optimization framework, our approach excels at resolving the overlaps between biclusters, which are important features of biclusters in practice. Moreover, Expectation-Maximization can be used to learn the model parameters if they are unknown. In simulations, we find that our method outperforms two of the best existing biclustering algorithms, ISA and LAS, when the planted clusters overlap. Applied to three gene expression datasets, our method finds coregulated gene clusters that have high quality in terms of cluster size and density.

We prove that the true underlying directed acyclic graph (DAG) in Gaussian linear structural equation models is identifiable as the minimum-trace DAG when the error variances are weakly increasing with respect to the true causal ordering. This result bridges two existing frameworks as it extends the identifiable cases within the minimum-trace DAG method and provides a principled interpretation of the algorithmic ordering search approach, revealing that its objective is actually to minimize the total residual sum of squares. On the computational side, we prove that the hill climbing algorithm with a random-to-random (R2R) neighborhood does not admit any strict local optima. Under standard settings, we confirm the result through extensive simulations, observing only a few weak local optima. Interestingly, algorithms using other neighborhoods of equal size exhibit suboptimal behavior, having strict local optima and a substantial number of weak local optima.

Internet live streaming is widely used in online entertainment and e-commerce, where live advertising is an important marketing tool for anchors. An advertising campaign hopes to maximize the effect (such as conversions) under constraints (such as budget and cost-per-click). The mainstream control of campaigns is auto-bidding, where the performance depends on the decision of the bidding algorithm in each request. The most widely used auto-bidding algorithms include Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control, linear programming (LP), reinforcement learning (RL), etc. Existing methods either do not consider the entire time traffic, or have too high computational complexity. In this paper, the live advertising has high requirements for real-time bidding (second-level control) and faces the difficulty of unknown future traffic. Therefore, we propose a lightweight bidding algorithm Binary Constrained Bidding (BiCB), which neatly combines the optimal bidding formula given by mathematical analysis and the statistical method of future traffic estimation, and obtains good approximation to the optimal result through a low complexity solution. In addition, we complement the form of upper and lower bound constraints for traditional auto-bidding modeling and give theoretical analysis of BiCB. Sufficient offline and online experiments prove BiCB's good performance and low engineering cost.

Integrating multi-omics datasets through data-driven analysis offers a comprehensive understanding of the complex biological processes underlying various diseases, particularly cancer. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently demonstrated remarkable ability to exploit relational structures in biological data, enabling advances in multi-omics integration for cancer subtype classification. Existing approaches often neglect the intricate coupling between heterogeneous omics, limiting their capacity to resolve subtle cancer subtype heterogeneity critical for precision oncology. To address these limitations, we propose a framework named Graph Transformer for Multi-omics Cancer Subtype Classification (GTMancer). This framework builds upon the GNN optimization problem and extends its application to complex multi-omics data. Specifically, our method leverages contrastive learning to embed multi-omics data into a unified semantic space. We unroll the multiplex graph optimization problem in that unified space and introduce dual sets of attention coefficients to capture structural graph priors both within and among multi-omics data. This approach enables global omics information to guide the refining of the representations of individual omics. Empirical experiments on seven real-world cancer datasets demonstrate that GTMancer outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

Combinatorial optimization problems, such as Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP), are important in real-world applications as they search for efficient solutions to minimize costs. Despite extensive research over decades, achieving optimal solutions remains a challenge (Laporte, 2009). Furthermore, the unique constraints of various problem variants demand specialized algorithms. The development of these algorithms is complex, making Machine Learning (ML) an attractive approach to improving the existing algorithms. Routing algorithms are typically divided into two categories: exact algorithms that offer global optimum but require many computational resources and heuristics methods for practical, real-world applications that mostly find a near-optimal solution. While most heuristics rely on human-designed strategies (Lucas et al., 2020), ML offers a new approach improving algorithm. Moreover, the selection of features influenced by these ML models plays a critical role in effectively enhancing heuristic performances (Arnold and S orensen, 2019b; Arnold and S orensen, 2019a; Lucas, Billot, and Sevaux, 2019). Understanding the predictions of an ML model can be as crucial as the accuracy of the prediction itself in many applications (Lundberg and Lee, 2017).

-- We tackle the data-driven chance-constrained density steering problem using the Gromov-Wasserstein metric. The underlying dynamical system is an unknown linear controlled recursion, with the assumption that sufficiently rich input-output data from pre-operational experiments are available. The initial state is modeled as a Gaussian mixture, while the terminal state is required to match a specified Gaussian distribution. We reformulate the resulting optimal control problem as a difference-of-convex program and show that it can be efficiently and tractably solved using the DC algorithm. The term data-driven has become increasingly prevalent in the modern control literature [1].

Digital advertising platforms operate millisecond-level auctions through Real-Time Bidding (RTB) systems, where advertisers compete for ad impressions through algorithmic bids. This dynamic mechanism enables precise audience targeting but introduces profound operational complexity due to advertiser heterogeneity: budgets and ROI targets span orders of magnitude across advertisers, from individual merchants to multinational brands. This diversity creates a demanding adaptation landscape for Multi-Constraint Bidding (MCB). Traditional auto-bidding solutions fail in this environment due to two critical flaws: 1) severe sample inefficiency, where failed explorations under specific constraints yield no transferable knowledge for new budget-ROI combinations, and 2) limited generalization under constraint shifts, as they ignore physical relationships between constraints and bidding coefficients. To address this, we propose HALO: Hindsight-Augmented Learning for Online Auto-Bidding. HALO introduces a theoretically grounded hindsight mechanism that re-purposes all explorations into training data for arbitrary constraint configuration via trajectory reorientation. Further, it employs B-spline functional representation, enabling continuous, derivative-aware bid mapping across constraint spaces. HALO ensures robust adaptation even when budget/ROI requirements differ drastically from training scenarios. Industrial dataset evaluations demonstrate the superiority of HALO in handling multi-scale constraints, reducing constraint violations while improving GMV .

Rental-based business models and increasing sustainability requirements intensify the need for efficient strategies to manage large machine and vehicle fleet renewal and upgrades. Optimized fleet upgrade strategies maximize overall utility, cost, and sustainability. However, conventional fleet optimization does not account for upgrade options and is based on integer programming with exponential runtime scaling, which leads to substantial computational cost when dealing with large fleets and repeated decision-making processes. This contribution firstly suggests an extended integer programming approach that determines optimal renewal and upgrade decisions. The computational burden is addressed by a second, alternative machine learning-based method that transforms the task to a mixed discrete-continuous optimization problem. Both approaches are evaluated in a real-world automotive industry case study, which shows that the machine learning approach achieves near-optimal solutions with significant improvements in the scalability and overall computational performance, thus making it a practical alternative for large-scale fleet management.

With advances in scientific computing, computer experiments are increasingly used for optimizing complex systems. However, for modern applications, e.g., the optimization of nuclear physics detectors, each experiment run can require hundreds of CPU hours, making the optimization of its black-box simulator over a high-dimensional space a challenging task. Given limited runs at inputs $\mathbf{x}_1, \cdots, \mathbf{x}_n$, the best solution from these evaluated inputs can be far from optimal, particularly as dimensionality increases. Existing black-box methods, however, largely employ this ''pick-the-winner'' (PW) solution, which leads to mediocre optimization performance. To address this, we propose a new Black-box Optimization via Marginal Means (BOMM) approach. The key idea is a new estimator of a global optimizer $\mathbf{x}^*$ that leverages the so-called marginal mean functions, which can be efficiently inferred with limited runs in high dimensions. Unlike PW, this estimator can select solutions beyond evaluated inputs for improved optimization performance. Assuming the objective function follows a generalized additive model with unknown link function and under mild conditions, we prove that the BOMM estimator not only is consistent for optimization, but also has an optimization rate that tempers the ''curse-of-dimensionality'' faced by existing methods, thus enabling better performance as dimensionality increases. We present a practical framework for implementing BOMM using the transformed additive Gaussian process surrogate model. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of BOMM in numerical experiments and an application on neutrino detector optimization in nuclear physics.