Actor-Critic Pretraining for Proximal Policy Optimization
arXiv:2602.23804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) actor-critic algorithms enable autonomous learning but often require a large number of environment interactions, which limits their applicability in robotics. Leveraging expert data can reduce the number of required environment interactions. A...
Beyond State-Wise Mirror Descent: Offline Policy Optimization with Parameteric Policies
arXiv:2602.23811v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the theoretical aspects of offline reinforcement learning (RL) under general function approximation. While prior works (e.g., Xie et al., 2021) have established the theoretical foundations of learning a good policy from offline data...
Learning to maintain safety through expert demonstrations in settings with unknown constraints: A Q-learning perspective
arXiv:2602.23816v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given a set of trajectories demonstrating the execution of a task safely in a constrained MDP with observable rewards but with unknown constraints and non-observable costs, we aim to find a policy that maximizes the...
Inferring Chronic Treatment Onset from ePrescription Data: A Renewal Process Approach
arXiv:2602.23824v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Longitudinal electronic health record (EHR) data are often left-censored, making diagnosis records incomplete and unreliable for determining disease onset. In contrast, outpatient prescriptions form renewal-based trajectories that provide a continuous signal of disease management. We...
FedNSAM:Consistency of Local and Global Flatness for Federated Learning
arXiv:2602.23827v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In federated learning (FL), multi-step local updates and data heterogeneity usually lead to sharper global minima, which degrades the performance of the global model. Popular FL algorithms integrate sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) into local training to...
ULW-SleepNet: An Ultra-Lightweight Network for Multimodal Sleep Stage Scoring
arXiv:2602.23852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic sleep stage scoring is crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders. Although deep learning models have advanced the field, many existing models are computationally demanding and designed for single-channel electroencephalography (EEG), limiting...
A Theory of Random Graph Shift in Truncated-Spectrum vRKHS
arXiv:2602.23880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper develops a theory of graph classification under domain shift through a random-graph generative lens, where we consider intra-class graphs sharing the same random graph model (RGM) and the domain shift induced by changes...
Learning Generation Orders for Masked Discrete Diffusion Models via Variational Inference
arXiv:2602.23968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked discrete diffusion models (MDMs) are a promising new approach to generative modelling, offering the ability for parallel token generation and therefore greater efficiency than autoregressive counterparts. However, achieving an optimal balance between parallel generation...
Intrinsic Lorentz Neural Network
arXiv:2602.23981v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world data frequently exhibit latent hierarchical structures, which can be naturally represented by hyperbolic geometry. Although recent hyperbolic neural networks have demonstrated promising results, many existing architectures remain partially intrinsic, mixing Euclidean operations with hyperbolic...
MINT: Multimodal Imaging-to-Speech Knowledge Transfer for Early Alzheimer's Screening
arXiv:2602.23994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder in which mild cognitive impairment (MCI) marks a critical transition between aging and dementia. Neuroimaging modalities, such as structural MRI, provide biomarkers of this transition; however, their high...
Foundation World Models for Agents that Learn, Verify, and Adapt Reliably Beyond Static Environments
arXiv:2602.23997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The next generation of autonomous agents must not only learn efficiently but also act reliably and adapt their behavior in open worlds. Standard approaches typically assume fixed tasks and environments with little or no novelty,...
InfoNCE Induces Gaussian Distribution
arXiv:2602.24012v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contrastive learning has become a cornerstone of modern representation learning, allowing training with massive unlabeled data for both task-specific and general (foundation) models. A prototypical loss in contrastive training is InfoNCE and its variants. In...
pathsig: A GPU-Accelerated Library for Truncated and Projected Path Signatures
arXiv:2602.24066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Path signatures provide a rich representation of sequential data, with strong theoretical guarantees and good performance in a variety of machine-learning tasks. While signatures have progressed from fixed feature extractors to trainable components of machine-learning...
Court sides with parents in dispute over California policies on transgender students
The Supreme Court on Monday night granted a request from a group of California parents to reinstate a ruling by a federal district court that prohibits schools in that state […]The postCourt sides with parents in dispute over California policies...
Supreme Court grants Republicans’ request to pause order to redraw New York congressional map
The Supreme Court on Monday night cleared the way for New York to go forward with the 2026 elections using the state’s existing congressional map. Over the objections of the […]The postSupreme Court grants Republicans’ request to pause order to...
Court turns down several cases, including on filing fees for indigent prisoners and ability of felons to possess guns
Over the objections of the court’s three Democratic appointees, the Supreme Court on Monday morning declined to hear a case involving the payment of filing fees by indigent prisoners. The […]The postCourt turns down several cases, including on filing fees...
Birthright citizenship: A note on foundlings and comments on four complementary amicus briefs
Foundlings – babies born of unknown parentage – loomed large in the imagination of mid-19th century Americans, who dutifully read their Bibles and thought about baby Moses in a basket. […]The postBirthright citizenship: A note on foundlings and comments on...
Supreme Court skeptical of law banning drug users from possessing firearms
The Supreme Court on Monday was skeptical that the indictment of a Texas man on charges that he violated a federal law prohibiting the possession of a gun by the […]The postSupreme Court skeptical of law banning drug users from...
Justices to consider breadth of a federal defendant’s waiver of appeal
In Hunter v. United States, to be argued on Tuesday, March 3, the Supreme Court will address how broad federal defendants’ waivers of their right to appeal can be and […]The postJustices to consider breadth of a federal defendant’s waiver...
SCOTUStoday for Monday, March 2
If you are looking for a great introduction to this morning’s argument in United States v. Hemani, please check out this animated explainer, done in partnership with Briefly. Our live […]The postSCOTUStoday for Monday, March 2appeared first onSCOTUSblog.
Cursor has reportedly surpassed $2B in annualized revenue
The four-year-old startup saw its revenue run rate double over the past three months, according to one Bloomberg source.
Investors spill what they aren’t looking for anymore in AI SaaS companies
TechCrunch spoke with VCs to learn what investors aren't looking for in AI SaaS startups anymore.
Right Diagnosis, Wrong Cure: Reconceptualizing the Commerce Clause Basis for the Federal Prohibition on Felon Firearm Possession
Introduction Jonathan Adler recently posted the provocative piece: “Is the Federal Prohibition on Felon Firearm Possession Constitutional?”[1] Although Second Amendment challenges are all the rage, Adler instead asks about Congress’s commerce power. This Essay takes up Adler’s challenge to reconceptualize...
First Amendment Inversion
Introduction A new arrangement of First Amendment positions has upturned constitutional discourse in key areas. Familiar perspectives have transposed not only in Supreme Court opinions but also in policymaking and public debate—and some are reverting back. Inversion on important questions...
Expressive Association as Shield, not Sword: A Constitutional Defense of DEI
Introduction Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)—an effort aimed at remedying historic inequality in opportunities—faces the chopping block. Its opposition claims it commits the very sin it aimed to rid: discrimination. DEI’s opposition has mobilized and attacked on all fronts, already...
Academic Freedom by Other Names: Historical Foundations for the First Amendment Right
Introduction The Supreme Court has stated that academic freedom is a “special concern” of the First Amendment.[1] Yet before 1957, there were no American legal precedents that recognized academic freedom as a component of the First Amendment. But these protections...
Multilevel Determinants of Overweight and Obesity Among U.S. Children Aged 10-17: Comparative Evaluation of Statistical and Machine Learning Approaches Using the 2021 National Survey of Children's Health
arXiv:2602.20303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background: Childhood and adolescent overweight and obesity remain major public health concerns in the United States and are shaped by behavioral, household, and community factors. Their joint predictive structure at the population level remains incompletely...
An artificial intelligence framework for end-to-end rare disease phenotyping from clinical notes using large language models
arXiv:2602.20324v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Phenotyping is fundamental to rare disease diagnosis, but manual curation of structured phenotypes from clinical notes is labor-intensive and difficult to scale. Existing artificial intelligence approaches typically optimize individual components of phenotyping but do not...
DMCD: Semantic-Statistical Framework for Causal Discovery
arXiv:2602.20333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present DMCD (DataMap Causal Discovery), a two-phase causal discovery framework that integrates LLM-based semantic drafting from variable metadata with statistical validation on observational data. In Phase I, a large language model proposes a sparse...
Diffusion Modulation via Environment Mechanism Modeling for Planning
arXiv:2602.20422v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have shown promising capabilities in trajectory generation for planning in offline reinforcement learning (RL). However, conventional diffusion-based planning methods often fail to account for the fact that generating trajectories in RL requires unique...