This work is conducted at Microsoft Research Asia.

Shooting at St. Louis Starbucks kills former Team USA synchronized figure skater, coach Gabrielle "Sam" Linehan, 28, during alleged armed robbery in Tower Grove East neighborhood Tuesday.

The Mexican city of Guadalupe, which will host portions of the 2026 World Cup, recently showed off four new robot dogs that will help provide security during matches at BBVA Stadium. The K9-X "robodogs" will help officers patrol during the 2026 World Cup this summer. Authorities in Mexico's Guadalupe, Nuevo León, this week unveiled four robot dogs that will be part of the security devices at BBVA Stadium, one of the three Mexican venues of the 2026 World Cup . The robot dogs are not armed, but each unit incorporates video cameras, night vision, and communication systems that are used to issue warnings or instructions. Its function is to deter illegal activity, detect unusual behavior, identify suspicious objects, control crowds, and immediately alert law enforcement when the system deems necessary. Robot dogs operate semi-autonomously: They do not make decisions or execute movements on their own.

This paper studies the use of a machine learning-based estimator as a control variate for mitigating the variance of Monte Carlo sampling. Specifically, we seek to uncover the key factors that influence the efficiency of control variates in reducing variance.

Wedevelop twofundamental tools needed to apply SLC distributions to learning and inference:sampling and mode finding. For sampling we develop an MCMC sampler and give theoretical mixing time bounds.

Many applications require computing likelihoods and marginal probabilities over a distribution defined by a graphical model, tasks which are intractable in general [24].

Work done during an internship at Baidu Inc.

First, wepresent a unified framework that encompasses previous methods.