We study a decentralized multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem in which multiple clients are connected by time dependent random graphs provided by an environment. The reward distributions of each arm vary across clients and rewards are generated independently over time by an environment based on distributions that include both sub-exponential and sub-Gaussian distributions. Each client pulls an arm and communicates with neighbors based on the graph provided by the environment. The goal is to minimize the overall regret of the entire system through collaborations. To this end, we introduce a novel algorithmic framework, which first provides robust simulation methods for generating random graphs using rapidly mixing Markov chains or the random graph model, and then combines an averaging-based consensus approach with a newly proposed weighting technique and the upper confidence bound to deliver a UCB-type solution. Our algorithms account for the randomness in the graphs, removing the conventional doubly stochasticity assumption, and only require the knowledge of the number of clients at initialization. We derive optimal instance-dependent regret upper bounds of order logT in both sub-Gaussian and sub-exponential environments, and a nearly optimal mean-gap independent regret upper bound of order T logT up to a logT factor. Importantly, our regret bounds hold with high probability and capture graph randomness, whereas prior works consider expected regret under assumptions and require more stringent reward distributions.

We propose a novel uncertainty-and importance-aware speculative decoding framework that opportunistically skips LLM verification based on local token statistics. To mitigate attention collapse, we design an adaptive importance threshold that adjusts dynamically based on the distribution of attention weights at each decoding step. We provide extensive evaluations showing that our framework significantly reduces LLM usage, bandwidth, and energy costs--while maintaining or exceeding the accuracy of prior methods. We show that our framework is tunable: the strictness of the upload condition can be adjusted to achieve desired trade-offs across accuracy, latency, and energy efficiency. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section II introduces the system and wireless communication model. Section III presents the proposed opportunistic skipping mechanism based on token uncertainty and importance. Section IV evaluates the performance of our method in terms of accuracy, latency, token throughput, and energy efficiency. Section V concludes with key findings and potential future directions.

Hiking on complex trails demands balance, agility, and adaptive decision-making over unpredictable terrain. Current humanoid research remains fragmented and inadequate for hiking: locomotion focuses on motor skills without long-term goals or situational awareness, while semantic navigation overlooks real-world embodiment and local terrain variability. We propose training humanoids to hike on complex trails, driving integrative skill development across visual perception, decision making, and motor execution. We develop a learning framework, LEGO-H, that enables a vision-equipped humanoid robot to hike complex trails autonomously. We introduce two technical innovations: 1) A temporal vision transformer variant - tailored into Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning framework - anticipates future local goals to guide movement, seamlessly integrating locomotion with goal-directed navigation. 2) Latent representations of joint movement patterns, combined with hierarchical metric learning - enhance Privileged Learning scheme - enable smooth policy transfer from privileged training to onboard execution. These components allow LEGO-H to handle diverse physical and environmental challenges without relying on predefined motion patterns. Experiments across varied simulated trails and robot morphologies highlight LEGO-H's versatility and robustness, positioning hiking as a compelling testbed for embodied autonomy and LEGO-H as a baseline for future humanoid development.

Privacy protection of users' entire contribution of samples is important in distributed systems. The most effective approach is the two-stage scheme, which finds a small interval first and then gets a refined estimate by clipping samples into the interval. However, the clipping operation induces bias, which is serious if the sample distribution is heavy-tailed. Besides, users with large local sample sizes can make the sensitivity much larger, thus the method is not suitable for imbalanced users. Motivated by these challenges, we propose a Huber loss minimization approach to mean estimation under user-level differential privacy. The connecting points of Huber loss can be adaptively adjusted to deal with imbalanced users. Moreover, it avoids the clipping operation, thus significantly reducing the bias compared with the two-stage approach. We provide a theoretical analysis of our approach, which gives the noise strength needed for privacy protection, as well as the bound of mean squared error. The result shows that the new method is much less sensitive to the imbalance of user-wise sample sizes and the tail of sample distributions. Finally, we perform numerical experiments to validate our theoretical analysis.

Current state-of-the-art models for natural language understanding require a preprocessing step to convert raw text into discrete tokens. This process known as tokenization relies on a pre-built vocabulary of words or sub-word morphemes. This fixed vocabulary limits the model's robustness to spelling errors and its capacity to adapt to new domains. In this work, we introduce a novel open-vocabulary language model that adopts a hierarchical two-level approach: one at the word level and another at the sequence level. Concretely, we design an intra-word module that uses a shallow Transformer architecture to learn word representations from their characters, and a deep inter-word Transformer module that contextualizes each word representation by attending to the entire word sequence. Our model thus directly operates on character sequences with explicit awareness of word boundaries, but without biased sub-word or word-level vocabulary. Experiments on various downstream tasks show that our method outperforms strong baselines. We also demonstrate that our hierarchical model is robust to textual corruption and domain shift.

Recommender system has been proven to be significantly crucial in many fields and is widely used by various domains. Most of the conventional recommender systems rely on the numeric rating given by a user to reflect his opinion about a consumed item; however, these ratings are not available in many domains. As a result, a new source of information represented by the user-generated reviews is incorporated in the recommendation process to compensate for the lack of these ratings. The reviews contain prosperous and numerous information related to the whole item or a specific feature that can be extracted using the sentiment analysis field. This paper gives a comprehensive overview to help researchers who aim to work with recommender system and sentiment analysis. It includes a background of the recommender system concept, including phases, approaches, and performance metrics used in recommender systems. Then, it discusses the sentiment analysis concept and highlights the main points in the sentiment analysis, including level, approaches, and focuses on aspect-based sentiment analysis.

We propose a novel framework for verifiable and compositional reinforcement learning (RL) in which a collection of RL sub-systems, each of which learns to accomplish a separate sub-task, are composed to achieve an overall task. The framework consists of a high-level model, represented as a parametric Markov decision process (pMDP) which is used to plan and to analyze compositions of sub-systems, and of the collection of low-level sub-systems themselves. By defining interfaces between the sub-systems, the framework enables automatic decompositons of task specifications, e.g., reach a target set of states with a probability of at least 0.95, into individual sub-task specifications, i.e. achieve the sub-system's exit conditions with at least some minimum probability, given that its entry conditions are met. This in turn allows for the independent training and testing of the sub-systems; if they each learn a policy satisfying the appropriate sub-task specification, then their composition is guaranteed to satisfy the overall task specification. Conversely, if the sub-task specifications cannot all be satisfied by the learned policies, we present a method, formulated as the problem of finding an optimal set of parameters in the pMDP, to automatically update the sub-task specifications to account for the observed shortcomings. The result is an iterative procedure for defining sub-task specifications, and for training the sub-systems to meet them. As an additional benefit, this procedure allows for particularly challenging or important components of an overall task to be determined automatically, and focused on, during training. Experimental results demonstrate the presented framework's novel capabilities.

Exact inference in densely connected Bayesian networks is computationally intractable, and so there is considerable interest in developing effective approximation schemes. One approach which has been adopted is to bound the log likelihood using a mean-field approximating distribution. While this leads to a tractable algorithm, the mean field distribution is assumed to be factorial and hence unimodal. In this paper we demonstrate the feasibility of using a richer class of approximating distributions based on mixtures of mean field distributions. We derive an efficient algorithm for updating the mixture parameters and apply it to the problem of learning in sigmoid belief networks. Our results demonstrate a systematic improvement over simple mean field theory as the number of mixture components is increased.

Exact inference in densely connected Bayesian networks is computationally intractable, and so there is considerable interest in developing effective approximation schemes. One approach which has been adopted is to bound the log likelihood using a mean-field approximating distribution. While this leads to a tractable algorithm, the mean field distribution is assumed to be factorial and hence unimodal. In this paper we demonstrate the feasibility of using a richer class of approximating distributions based on mixtures of mean field distributions. We derive an efficient algorithm for updating the mixture parameters and apply it to the problem of learning in sigmoid belief networks. Our results demonstrate a systematic improvement over simple mean field theory as the number of mixture components is increased.

Exact inference in densely connected Bayesian networks is computationally intractable,and so there is considerable interest in developing effective approximation schemes. One approach which has been adopted is to bound the log likelihood using a mean-field approximating distribution. While this leads to a tractable algorithm, the mean field distribution is assumed tobe factorial and hence unimodal. In this paper we demonstrate the feasibility of using a richer class of approximating distributions based on mixtures of mean field distributions. We derive an efficient algorithm for updating the mixture parameters and apply it to the problem of learning insigmoid belief networks. Our results demonstrate a systematic improvement over simple mean field theory as the number of mixture components is increased.