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What you need to know as Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman begins

Engadget

What you need to know as Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman begins It's sure to be cringe, and may end up costing OpenAI billions. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit on March 11, 2026 in Washington, DC. In a few short days, jury selection will begin in the long-awaited case. At the end of that process, an Oakland federal court will task nine regular people with deciding if OpenAI defrauded Elon Musk when it announced, and recently completed, its reorganization to become a more traditional for-profit business . More than just being the venue where two billionaires will air their grievances against one another in public, the trial has the potential to reshape the AI industry.


Dynamic pricing and assortment under a contextual MNL demand

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider dynamic multi-product pricing and assortment problems under an unknown demand over T periods, where in each period, the seller decides on the price for each product or the assortment of products to offer to a customer who chooses according to an unknown Multinomial Logit Model (MNL). Such problems arise in many applications, including online retail and advertising. We propose a randomized dynamic pricing policy based on a variant of the Online Newton Step algorithm (ONS) that achieves a O(d T log(T))regret guarantee under an adversarial arrival model. We also present a new optimistic algorithm for the adversarial MNL contextual bandits problem, which achieves a better dependency than the state-of-the-art algorithms in a problem-dependent constant ฮบ2 (potentially exponentially small). Our regret upper bound scales as O(d ฮบ2T +log(T)/ฮบ2), which gives a stronger bound than the existing O(d T/ฮบ2)guarantees.


Dynamic pricing and assortment under a contextual MNL demand

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider dynamic multi-product pricing and assortment problems under an unknown demand over T periods, where in each period, the seller decides on the price for each product or the assortment of products to offer to a customer who chooses according to an unknown Multinomial Logit Model (MNL). Such problems arise in many applications, including online retail and advertising. We propose a randomized dynamic pricing policy based on a variant of the Online Newton Step algorithm (ONS) that achieves a O(d T log(T))regret guarantee under an adversarial arrival model. We also present a new optimistic algorithm for the adversarial MNL contextual bandits problem, which achieves a better dependency than the state-of-the-art algorithms in a problem-dependent constant ฮบ2 (potentially exponentially small). Our regret upper bound scales as O(d ฮบ2T +log(T)/ฮบ2), which gives a stronger bound than the existing O(d T/ฮบ2)guarantees.




Preserved central model for faster bidirectional compression in distributed settings

Neural Information Processing Systems

We develop a new approach to tackle communication constraints in a distributed learning problem with a central server. We propose and analyze a new algorithm that performs bidirectional compression and achieves the same convergence rate as algorithms using only uplink (from the local workers to the central server) compression. To obtain this improvement, we design MCM, an algorithm such that the downlink compression only impacts local models, while the global model is preserved. As a result, and contrary to previous works, the gradients on local servers are computed on perturbed models. Consequently, convergence proofs are more challenging and require a precise control of this perturbation. To ensure it, MCMadditionally combines model compression with a memory mechanism. This analysis opens new doors, e.g.





165bbd0a0a1b9470ec34d5afec582d2e-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Sortition is a form of democracy built on random selection of representatives. Two of the key arguments in favor of sortition are that it provides representation (a random panel reflects the composition of the population) and fairness (everyone has a chance to participate). Uniformly random selection is perfectly fair, but is it representative? Towards answering this question, we introduce the notion of a representation metric on the space of individuals, and assume that the cost of an individual for a panel is determined by the q-th closest representative; the representation of a (random) panel is measured by the ratio between the (expected) sum of costs of the optimal panel for the individuals and that of the given panel. For k/2