Online Conformal Prediction: Enforcing monotonicity via Online Optimization

Conformal prediction provides a principled framework for uncertainty quantification with finite-sample coverage guarantees. While recent work has extended conformal prediction to online and sequential settings, existing methods typically focus on a single coverage level and do not ensure consistency across multiple confidence levels. In many real-world applications, such as weather forecasting, macroeconomic prediction, and risk management, different users operate under heterogeneous risk tolerances and require calibrated uncertainty estimates across a range of coverage levels. In such settings, it is desirable to produce prediction sets corresponding to different coverage levels that are nested and valid simultaneously. In this paper, we propose two novel online conformal prediction methods that output \emph{nested prediction sets} across a range of coverage levels, enabling simultaneous uncertainty quantification across the entire risk spectrum. Beyond interpretability, jointly estimating multiple coverage levels is known to improve statistical efficiency in classical quantile regression by enforcing non-crossing constraints and sharing information across quantiles. Our approaches leverage an online optimization perspective with small regret that translates to quantile estimation error control while enforcing nestedness of prediction sets. Empirical results on synthetic and real-world datasets, including applications in forecasting tasks with heterogeneous risk requirements, demonstrate that our method achieves stable coverage across all levels, strictly nested prediction sets, and improved efficiency compared to existing online conformal baselines.

Compute Aligned Training: Optimizing for Test Time Inference

Scaling test-time compute has emerged as a powerful mechanism for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance. However, standard post-training paradigms, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), optimize the likelihood of individual samples under a base policy, creating a misalignment with test time procedures that rely on aggregated or filtered outputs. In this work, we propose Compute Aligned Training, which aligns training objectives with test-time strategies. By conceptualizing inference strategies as operators on the base policy, we derive new loss functions that maximize performance when said strategies are applied. We instantiate such loss functions for SFT and RL across common test time strategies. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that this training method substantially improves test time scaling over standard training.

Distribution-Free Robust Predict-Then-Optimize in Function Spaces

The need to rapidly solve PDEs in engineering design workflows has spurred the rise of neural surrogate models. In particular, neural operator models provide a discretization-invariant surrogate by retaining the infinite-dimensional, functional form of their arguments. Despite improved throughput, such methods lack guarantees on accuracy, unlike classical numerical PDE solvers. Optimizing engineering designs under these potentially miscalibrated surrogates thus runs the risk of producing designs that perform poorly upon deployment. In a similar vein, there is growing interest in automated decision-making under black-box predictors in the finite-dimensional setting, where a similar risk of suboptimality exists under poorly calibrated models. For this reason, methods have emerged that produce adversarially robust decisions under uncertainty estimates of the upstream model. One such framework leverages conformal prediction, a distribution-free post-hoc uncertainty quantification method, to provide these estimates due to its natural pairing with black-box predictors. We herein extend this line of conformally robust decision-making to infinite-dimensional function spaces. We first extend the typical conformal prediction guarantees over finite-dimensional spaces to infinite-dimensional Sobolev spaces. We then demonstrate how such uncertainty can be leveraged to robustly formulate engineering design tasks and characterize the suboptimality of the resulting robust optimal designs. We then empirically demonstrate the generality of our functional conformal coverage method across a diverse collection of PDEs, including the Poisson and heat equations, and showcase the significant improvement of such robust design in a quantum state discrimination task.

Distribution-Free Robust Functional Predict-Then-Optimize

The solution of PDEs in decision-making tasks is increasingly being undertaken with the help of neural operator surrogate models due to the need for repeated evaluation. Such methods, while significantly more computationally favorable compared to their numerical counterparts, fail to provide any calibrated notions of uncertainty in their predictions. Current methods approach this deficiency typically with ensembling or Bayesian posterior estimation. However, these approaches either require distributional assumptions that fail to hold in practice or lack practical scalability, limiting their applications in practice. We, therefore, propose a novel application of conformal prediction to produce distribution-free uncertainty quantification over the function spaces mapped by neural operators. We then demonstrate how such prediction regions enable a formal regret characterization if leveraged in downstream robust decision-making tasks. We further demonstrate how such posited robust decision-making tasks can be efficiently solved using an infinite-dimensional generalization of Danskin's Theorem and calculus of variations and empirically demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method over more restrictive modeling paradigms, such as Gaussian Processes, across several engineering tasks.

On Generation in Metric Spaces

We study generation in separable metric instance spaces. We extend the language generation framework from Kleinberg and Mullainathan [2024] beyond countable domains by defining novelty through metric separation and allowing asymmetric novelty parameters for the adversary and the generator. We introduce the $(\varepsilon,\varepsilon')$-closure dimension, a scale-sensitive analogue of closure dimension, which yields characterizations of uniform and non-uniform generatability and a sufficient condition for generation in the limit. Along the way, we identify a sharp geometric contrast. Namely, in doubling spaces, including all finite-dimensional normed spaces, generatability is stable across novelty scales and invariant under equivalent metrics. In general metric spaces, however, generatability can be highly scale-sensitive and metric-dependent; even in the natural infinite-dimensional Hilbert space $\ell^2$, all notions of generation may fail abruptly as the novelty parameters vary.

A Characterization of List Language Identification in the Limit

We study the problem of language identification in the limit, where given a sequence of examples from a target language, the goal of the learner is to output a sequence of guesses for the target language such that all the guesses beyond some finite time are correct. Classical results of Gold showed that language identification in the limit is impossible for essentially any interesting collection of languages. Later, Angluin gave a precise characterization of language collections for which this task is possible. Motivated by recent positive results for the related problem of language generation, we revisit the classic language identification problem in the setting where the learner is given the additional power of producing a list of $k$ guesses at each time step. The goal is to ensure that beyond some finite time, one of the guesses is correct at each time step. We give an exact characterization of collections of languages that can be $k$-list identified in the limit, based on a recursive version of Angluin's characterization (for language identification with a list of size $1$). This further leads to a conceptually appealing characterization: A language collection can be $k$-list identified in the limit if and only if the collection can be decomposed into $k$ collections of languages, each of which can be identified in the limit (with a list of size $1$). We also use our characterization to establish rates for list identification in the statistical setting where the input is drawn as an i.i.d. stream from a distribution supported on some language in the collection. Our results show that if a collection is $k$-list identifiable in the limit, then the collection can be $k$-list identified at an exponential rate, and this is best possible. On the other hand, if a collection is not $k$-list identifiable in the limit, then it cannot be $k$-list identified at any rate that goes to zero.

Offline Constrained Reinforcement Learning under Partial Data Coverage

We study offline constrained reinforcement learning (RL) with general function approximation. We aim to learn a policy from a pre-collected dataset that maximizes the expected discounted cumulative reward for a primary reward signal while ensuring that expected discounted returns for multiple auxiliary reward signals are above predefined thresholds. Existing algorithms either require fully exploratory data, are computationally inefficient, or depend on an additional auxiliary function classes to obtain an $\epsilon$-optimal policy with sample complexity $O(\epsilon^{-2})$. In this paper, we propose an oracle-efficient primal-dual algorithm based on a linear programming (LP) formulation, achieving $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ sample complexity under partial data coverage. By introducing a realizability assumption, our approach ensures that all saddle points of the Lagrangian are optimal, removing the need for regularization that complicated prior analyses. Through Lagrangian decomposition, our method extracts policies without requiring knowledge of the data-generating distribution, enhancing practical applicability.

Operator Learning for Schrödinger Equation: Unitarity, Error Bounds, and Time Generalization

We consider the problem of learning the evolution operator for the time-dependent Schr\"{o}dinger equation, where the Hamiltonian may vary with time. Existing neural network-based surrogates often ignore fundamental properties of the Schr\"{o}dinger equation, such as linearity and unitarity, and lack theoretical guarantees on prediction error or time generalization. To address this, we introduce a linear estimator for the evolution operator that preserves a weak form of unitarity. We establish both upper and lower bounds on the prediction error that hold uniformly over all sufficiently smooth initial wave functions. Additionally, we derive time generalization bounds that quantify how the estimator extrapolates beyond the time points seen during training. Experiments across real-world Hamiltonians -- including hydrogen atoms, ion traps for qubit design, and optical lattices -- show that our estimator achieves relative errors $10^{-2}$ to $10^{-3}$ times smaller than state-of-the-art methods such as the Fourier Neural Operator and DeepONet.

Continuum Transformers Perform In-Context Learning by Operator Gradient Descent

Transformers robustly exhibit the ability to perform in-context learning, whereby their predictive accuracy on a task can increase not by parameter updates but merely with the placement of training samples in their context windows. Recent works have shown that transformers achieve this by implementing gradient descent in their forward passes. Such results, however, are restricted to standard transformer architectures, which handle finite-dimensional inputs. In the space of PDE surrogate modeling, a generalization of transformers to handle infinite-dimensional function inputs, known as "continuum transformers," has been proposed and similarly observed to exhibit in-context learning. Despite impressive empirical performance, such in-context learning has yet to be theoretically characterized. We herein demonstrate that continuum transformers perform in-context operator learning by performing gradient descent in an operator RKHS. We demonstrate this using novel proof strategies that leverage a generalized representer theorem for Hilbert spaces and gradient flows over the space of functionals of a Hilbert space. We additionally show the operator learned in context is the Bayes Optimal Predictor in the infinite depth limit of the transformer. We then provide empirical validations of this optimality result and demonstrate that the parameters under which such gradient descent is performed are recovered through the continuum transformer training.

Generator-Mediated Bandits: Thompson Sampling for GenAI-Powered Adaptive Interventions

Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models have enabled the generation of personalized content that adapts to up-to-date user context. While personalized decision systems are often modeled using bandit formulations, the integration of GenAI introduces new structure into otherwise classical sequential learning problems. In GenAI-powered interventions, the agent selects a query, but the environment experiences a stochastic response drawn from the generative model. Standard bandit methods do not explicitly account for this structure, where actions influence rewards only through stochastic, observed treatments. We introduce generator-mediated bandit-Thompson sampling (GAMBITTS), a bandit approach designed for this action/treatment split, using mobile health interventions with large language model-generated text as a motivating case study. GAMBITTS explicitly models both the treatment and reward generation processes, using information in the delivered treatment to accelerate policy learning relative to standard methods. We establish regret bounds for GAMBITTS by decomposing sources of uncertainty in treatment and reward, identifying conditions where it achieves stronger guarantees than standard bandit approaches. In simulation studies, GAMBITTS consistently outperforms conventional algorithms by leveraging observed treatments to more accurately estimate expected rewards.