In federated language modeling, $K$ nodes each hold $n$ samples but cannot pool data or exchange full-precision gradients or weights. We study the minimax rate at which a conditional distribution over $V$ tokens can be estimated when each node may upload at most $B$ bits per query in a public probe set. In federated probe-logit distillation (FPLD), each node transmits a scalar-quantized logit vector on the probe set, and an aggregator distills a global parametric student. Prior work (Dubey and Huo, 2026) establishes a high-probability KL rate $O(d/(Kn) + ρ\sqrt{V \log V / m} + K^{-1} \cdot 2^{-2B/V})$ plus optimization slack, with the bandwidth term in its trace-sharpened form. Whether this bandwidth-term rate is tight, and how the upper bound generalizes to heterogeneous per-node bandwidths, are left open. We close both gaps. First, the dithered FPLD construction has a matching single-round lower bound $Ω(K^{-1} \cdot 2^{-2B/V})$ under non-degeneracy, pinning the bandwidth-axis rate at $Θ(K^{-1} \cdot 2^{-2B/V})$. $T$-round sequential refinement with nested/scaled residual quantizers achieves $O(K^{-1} \cdot 2^{-2TB/V})$; vanilla FPLD's $T$-independent bandwidth term is suboptimal for every $T > 1$. Second, we establish a heterogeneous-bandwidth upper bound for per-node budgets $B_i$, paired with a closed-form optimal allocation $B_i^* = B_{\mathrm{tot}}/K + (V/2) \log_2(w_i / \bar{w}_g)$, a log-tilted water-filling rule that is the per-node analogue of reverse water-filling for distortion-rate optimization. A plug-in adaptive variant estimates the weights from a short warm-up phase and attains $1 + O(\sqrt{\log(K/δ)/(m T_0)})$ relative suboptimality. Synthetic n-gram simulations confirm that empirical KL is bracketed by the upper and lower bounds and that the optimal allocation strictly dominates uniform and inverse-weighted baselines under heterogeneous clipping.

Evaluating large language models increasingly relies on LLM-as-a-judge protocols, but such evaluations remain costly: different judges have different prices and reliabilities, and the difficulty of each prompt-response pair can vary substantially. This raises a basic allocation question: under a fixed budget, how should one distribute evaluation queries across heterogeneous judges and instances to obtain the most accurate score estimates? We formalize this question as *budgeted heteroskedastic multi-judge estimation*. Given $K$ prompt-response pairs, $J$ judges with known costs, and unknown query-judge variances, the goal is to estimate a bounded score vector while minimizing an $\ell_p$-error. Our first contribution is to analyze the inverse-variance weighted estimator (IVWE) and to derive the oracle allocation that minimizes its error rate. Since this allocation depends on the unknown variances, we then address the practical unknown-variance setting by proposing EST-IVWE, an adaptive algorithm that constructs and leverages *optimistically biased* variance estimates to stabilize the empirical allocation. We prove that EST-IVWE matches the oracle IVWE rate up to lower-order terms in the budget. Our second and central theoretical contribution is a matching *local* minimax lower bound, which establishes the instance-optimality of the proposed algorithms. A key technical insight is that Fano-type high-probability arguments are too coarse for this problem: their packing construction loses the local variance structure that governs the optimal allocation. We instead use an Assouad-type in-expectation argument, based on local perturbations, which preserves this structure and yields the sharp allocation-dependent lower bound. Finally, we numerically validate the superiority of our approach over naïve uniform allocation on synthetic and HelpSteer2 datasets.

Let's follow the notations in Alg. 3 of Argmax Flow. We can unfold the determinant by the i-th row. This is illustrated in Figure A.1, where the adaptive Further details can be found in Tables A.2. Furthermore, we will make the code used to reproduce these results publicly available. In different environments, different state encoders were exploited. We used MLP encoder for discrete control tasks and CNN encoder for Pistonball task.

Learning the minimum/maximum mean among a finite set of distributions is a fundamental sub-task in planning, game tree search and reinforcement learning.

We call that σ -algebra history before n . Identification tasks We focus on best arm identification (BAI).

We study online learning for optimal allocation when the resource to be allocated is time. An agent receives task proposals sequentially according to a Poisson process and can either accept or reject a proposed task. If she accepts the proposal, she is busy for the duration of the task and obtains a reward that depends on the task duration. If she rejects it, she remains on hold until a new task proposal arrives. We study the regret incurred by the agent first when she knows her reward function but does not know the distribution of the task duration, and then when she does not know her reward function, either. Faster rates are finally obtained by adding structural assumptions on the distribution of rides or on the reward function. This natural setting bears similarities with contextual (one-armed) bandits, but with the crucial difference that the normalized reward associated to a context depends on the whole distribution of contexts.

Learning the minimum/maximum mean among a finite set of distributions is a fundamental sub-task in planning, game tree search and reinforcement learning.