Information on trajectories: martingales and random times

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Robot Papers editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Accounting for information flow on the path space of trajectories of a nonnegative martingale yields exact variational identities for it, even at arbitrary random times. This recovers the widely used classical concentration inequalities, from Ville to PAC-Bayes, and measures what each one discards. The tail a bound controls is itself a relative entropy, resolved by the chain rule into per-step conditional divergences. The discarded slack has an exact form in each of three geometries: a Gibbs tilt for the Azuma-Hoeffding and PAC-Bayes bounds, the crossing itself for Ville's and for pooled tests, and a dominating certificate for the $L^p$ maximal bound. That certificate's optional-stopping deficit resolves per step into Bregman divergences of the running maximum. On a path-time space, the same identity gains one factor that prices anticipation: an arbitrary random time carries an e-process ``peeking penalty.'' The partition function can be read as a coalescent--a prefix-sharing probability of independent copies--and geometric mixtures of test martingales gain a pooling benefit for multi-model safe testing.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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