We study the sample complexity of learning an $ε$-optimal policy in the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem. We first derive sample complexity bounds when the learner has access to a generative model. We show that there exists a worst-case SSP instance with $S$ states, $A$ actions, minimum cost $c_{\min}$, and maximum expected cost of the optimal policy over all states $B_{\star}$, where any algorithm requires at least $Ω(SAB_{\star}^3/(c_{\min}ε^2))$ samples to return an $ε$-optimal policy with high probability. Surprisingly, this implies that whenever $c_{\min} = 0$ an SSP problem may not be learnable, thus revealing that learning in SSPs is strictly harder than in the finite-horizon and discounted settings. We complement this lower bound with an algorithm that matches it, up to logarithmic factors, in the general case, and an algorithm that matches it up to logarithmic factors even when $c_{\min} = 0$, but only under the condition that the optimal policy has a bounded hitting time to the goal state.

Beyond conditional average treatment effects, treatments may impact the entire outcome distribution in covariate-dependent ways, for example, by altering the variance or tail risks for specific subpopulations. We propose a novel estimand to capture such conditional distributional treatment effects, and develop a doubly robust estimator that is minimax optimal in the local asymptotic sense. Using this, we develop a test for the global homogeneity of conditional potential outcome distributions that accommodates discrepancies beyond the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), has provably valid type 1 error, and is consistent against fixed alternatives -- the first test, to our knowledge, with such guarantees in this setting. Furthermore, we derive exact closed-form expressions for two natural discrepancies (including the MMD), and provide a computationally efficient, permutation-free algorithm for our test.

The531 raw RGB values are firstly divided by 256 (i.e.

We consider nonconvex stochastic optimization problems in the asynchronous centralized distributed setup where the communication times from workers to a server can not be ignored, and the computation and communication times are potentially different for all workers.

Thus, diagonal preconditioning methods remain popular.

Aligning foundation models is essential for their safe and trustworthy deployment.

Fig. S1: The proposed framework as a probabilistic graphical model. In this section we derive the variational lower-bound introduced in Sec.2.3 of the main article. W e firstly introduce Lemmas 1 and 2 as they appear in our derivations. As illustrated in Fig.S1, the ANN's input In Fig.S1 the lower boxes are the inducing points and other variables that determine the GPs' posterior. S1.1 Deriving the Lower-bound With Respect to the Kernel-mappings In the right-hand-side of Eq.S6 only the following terms are dependant on the kernel-mappings The first term is the expected log-likelihood of a Gaussian distribution (i.e. the conditional log-likelihood of Therefore, we can use Lemma.2 to simplify the first term: E According to Lemma.1 we have that Therefore, the KL-term of Eq.S8 is a constant with respect to the kernel mappings All in all, the lower-bound for optimizing the kernel-mappings is equal to the right-hand-side of Eq.S9 which was introduced and discussed in Sec.2.3. of the main article. S1.2 Deriving the Lower-bound With Respect to the ANN Parameters According to Eq.4 of the main article, in our formulation the ANN's parameters appear as some variational parameters. Therefore, the likelihood of all variables (Eq.S6) does not generally depend on the ANN's parameters. This likelihood turns out to be equivalent to commonly-used losses like the cross-entropy loss or the mean-squared loss. Here we elaborate upon how this happens. This conclusion was introduced and discussed in Eq.6 of the main article. W e can draw similar conclusions when the pipeline is for other tasks like regression, or even a combination of tasks.

We study parametric change-point detection, where the goal is to identify distributional changes in time series, under local differential privacy. In the non-private setting, we derive improved finite-sample accuracy guarantees for a change-point detection algorithm based on the generalized log-likelihood ratio test, via martingale methods. In the private setting, we propose two locally differentially private algorithms based on randomized response and binary mechanisms, and analyze their theoretical performance. We derive bounds on detection accuracy and validate our results through empirical evaluation. Our results characterize the statistical cost of local differential privacy in change-point detection and show how privacy degrades performance relative to a non-private benchmark. As part of this analysis, we establish a structural result for strong data processing inequalities (SDPI), proving that SDPI coefficients for Rényi divergences and their symmetric variants (Jeffreys-Rényi divergences) are achieved by binary input distributions. These results on SDPI coefficients are also of independent interest, with applications to statistical estimation, data compression, and Markov chain mixing.