Abstract:Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are a promising approach for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). Their training, however, is often difficult because multiple loss terms induced by PDE residuals and boundary or initial conditions must be optimized simultaneously. To address this difficulty, existing approaches often construct update directions by explicitly enforcing particular desirable properties, such as scale robustness and simultaneous descent. While effective in many cases, such property-by-property designs can make it unclear which conditions are essential, what geometric principle determines the selected update direction, and how different methods are structurally related. In this work, we formulate update-direction selection for PINN training as a Chebyshev-center problem in the dual cone. The proposed formulation selects a normalized direction that maximizes the minimum distance to the cone facets. The resulting formulation admits an efficient dual problem in a much lower-dimensional space and yields a convergence guarantee in the nonconvex setting. It also recovers the key desirable properties targeted by existing approaches without imposing them separately; rather, they follow from the single geometric criterion underlying the formulation. This makes the selected direction interpretable through a single geometric rule and provides a unified basis for systematically comparing related direction-selection methods. Experiments on several PINN benchmarks further demonstrate strong empirical performance of the proposed method.
Abstract:We study the $K$-armed logistic bandit problem, where at each round, the agent observes $K$ feature vectors associated with $K$ actions. Existing approaches that achieve a rate-optimal $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{dT})$ regret bound rely heavily on context diversity assumptions, such as strict positivity of the minimum eigenvalue of a context covariance matrix. These assumptions, however, impose strong restrictions on the context process, as they rule out the situation where the context vectors are concentrated in a low-dimensional subspace. In this paper, we propose SupSplitLog, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first algorithm for logistic bandits that achieves $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{dT})$ regret without any context diversity assumption. The key idea is to split the collected samples into two disjoint subsets when constructing estimators; one is used to compute an initial-point estimator, while the other is used to apply a Newton-type one-step correction procedure. The splitting rule is carefully designed to balance the accuracy requirements of the initial-point estimator and the one-step correction procedure. Moreover, SupSplitLog strictly improves on the existing algorithms in terms of the dependence on dimension $d$ in the regret upper bound. Furthermore, SupSplitLog can be adapted simply to deduce a regret bound that grows with a data-dependent complexity measure, avoiding a direct dependence on $d$, which is favorable when the context vectors are concentrated in a low-dimensional subspace. We also provide experimental results that demonstrate numerically the superiority of our algorithm, validating the theoretical results.
Abstract:We study safe reinforcement learning in finite-horizon linear mixture constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with adversarial rewards under full-information feedback and an unknown transition kernel. We propose a primal-dual policy optimization algorithm that achieves regret and constraint violation bounds of $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{d^2 H^3 K})$ under mild conditions, where $d$ is the feature dimension, $H$ is the horizon, and $K$ is the number of episodes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first provably efficient algorithm for linear mixture CMDPs with adversarial rewards. In particular, our regret bound is near-optimal, matching the known minimax lower bound up to logarithmic factors. The key idea is to introduce a regularized dual update that enables a drift-based analysis. This step is essential, as strong duality-based analysis cannot be directly applied when reward functions change across episodes. In addition, we extend weighted ridge regression-based parameter estimation to the constrained setting, allowing us to construct tighter confidence intervals that are crucial for deriving the near-optimal regret bound.
Abstract:Explosive demands for LLMs often cause user queries to accumulate in server queues, requiring efficient routing (query-LLM matching) and scheduling (query prioritization) mechanisms. Several online algorithms are being deployed, but they overlook the following two key challenges inherent to conversational LLM services: (1) unsatisfied users may retry queries, increasing the server backlog, and (2) requests for ``explicit" feedback, such as ratings, degrade user experiences. In this paper, we develop a joint routing and scheduling algorithm that leverages ``implicit" feedback inferred from user retrial behaviors. The key idea is to propose and study the framework of contextual queueing bandits with multinomial logit feedback (CQB-MNL). CQB-MNL models query retrials, as well as context-based learning for user preferences over LLMs. Our algorithm, anytime CQB (ACQB), achieves efficient learning while maintaining queue stability by combining Thompson sampling with forced exploration at a decaying rate. We show that ACQB simultaneously achieves a cumulative regret of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{t})$ for routing and a queue length regret of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(t^{-1/4})$ for any large $t$. For experiments, we refine query embeddings via contrastive learning while adopting a disjoint parameter model to learn LLM-specific parameters. Experiments on SPROUT, EmbedLLM, and RouterBench datasets confirm that both algorithms consistently outperform baselines.
Abstract:We introduce contextual queueing bandits, a new context-aware framework for scheduling while simultaneously learning unknown service rates. Individual jobs carry heterogeneous contextual features, based on which the agent chooses a job and matches it with a server to maximize the departure rate. The service/departure rate is governed by a logistic model of the contextual feature with an unknown server-specific parameter. To evaluate the performance of a policy, we consider queue length regret, defined as the difference in queue length between the policy and the optimal policy. The main challenge in the analysis is that the lists of remaining job features in the queue may differ under our policy versus the optimal policy for a given time step, since they may process jobs in different orders. To address this, we propose the idea of policy-switching queues equipped with a sophisticated coupling argument. This leads to a novel queue length regret decomposition framework, allowing us to understand the short-term effect of choosing a suboptimal job-server pair and its long-term effect on queue state differences. We show that our algorithm, CQB-$\varepsilon$, achieves a regret upper bound of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{-1/4})$. We also consider the setting of adversarially chosen contexts, for which our second algorithm, CQB-Opt, achieves a regret upper bound of $\mathcal{O}(\log^2 T)$. Lastly, we provide experimental results that validate our theoretical findings.
Abstract:We study the problem of neural logistic bandits, where the main task is to learn an unknown reward function within a logistic link function using a neural network. Existing approaches either exhibit unfavorable dependencies on $\kappa$, where $1/\kappa$ represents the minimum variance of reward distributions, or suffer from direct dependence on the feature dimension $d$, which can be huge in neural network-based settings. In this work, we introduce a novel Bernstein-type inequality for self-normalized vector-valued martingales that is designed to bypass a direct dependence on the ambient dimension. This lets us deduce a regret upper bound that grows with the effective dimension $\widetilde{d}$, not the feature dimension, while keeping a minimal dependence on $\kappa$. Based on the concentration inequality, we propose two algorithms, NeuralLog-UCB-1 and NeuralLog-UCB-2, that guarantee regret upper bounds of order $\widetilde{O}(\widetilde{d}\sqrt{\kappa T})$ and $\widetilde{O}(\widetilde{d}\sqrt{T/\kappa})$, respectively, improving on the existing results. Lastly, we report numerical results on both synthetic and real datasets to validate our theoretical findings.