The framework of feedback graphs is a generalizationof sequential decisionmaking with bandit or full information feedback. In this work, we study an extension where the directed feedback graph is stochastic, following a distribution similar to the classical Erdős-Rényi model. Specifically, in each round every edge in the graph is either realized or not with a distinct probability for each edge.

Statistical approaches [5] for the forecasting problem are fairly newcompared tomore traditional mechanistic approaches [13, 38].

To address the lack of public power system data for machine learning research in energy networks, we investigate the use of variational graph autoencoders (VGAEs) for synthetic distribution grid generation. Using two open-source datasets, ENGAGE and DINGO, we evaluate four decoder variants and compare generated networks against the original grids using structural and spectral metrics. Results indicate that simple decoders fail to capture realistic topologies, while GCN-based approaches achieve strong fidelity on ENGAGE but struggle on the more complex DINGO dataset, producing artifacts such as disconnected components and repeated motifs. These findings highlight both the promise and limitations of VGAEs for grid synthesis, underscoring the need for more expressive generative models and robust evaluation. We release our models and analysis as open source to support benchmarking and accelerate progress in ML-driven power system research.

Most real-world networks are too large to be measured or studied directly and there is substantial interest in estimating global network properties from smaller sub-samples. One of the most important global properties is the number of vertices/nodes in the network.

The framework of feedback graphs is a generalization of sequential decision-making with bandit or full information feedback. In this work, we study an extension where the directed feedback graph is stochastic, following a distribution similar to the classical Erdős-Rényi model. Specifically, in each round every edge in the graph is either realized or not with a distinct probability for each edge.

The framework of feedback graphs is a generalization of sequential decision-making with bandit or full information feedback. In this work, we study an extension where the directed feedback graph is stochastic, following a distribution similar to the classical Erdős-Rényi model. Specifically, in each round every edge in the graph is either realized or not with a distinct probability for each edge.

The Elementary Shortest-Path Problem(ESPP) seeks a minimum cost path from s to t that visits each vertex at most once. The presence of negative-cost cycles renders the problem NP-hard. We present a probabilistic method for finding near-optimal ESPP, enabled by an unsupervised graph neural network that jointly learns node value estimates and edge-selection probabilities via a surrogate loss function. The loss provides a high probability certificate of finding near-optimal ESPP solutions by simultaneously reducing negative-cost cycles and embedding the desired algorithmic alignment. At inference time, a decoding algorithm transforms the learned edge probabilities into an elementary path. Experiments on graphs of up to 100 nodes show that the proposed method surpasses both unsupervised baselines and classical heuristics, while exhibiting high performance in cross-size and cross-topology generalization on unseen synthetic graphs.