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Alejandro Ribeiro

Publications and source records attributed to Alejandro Ribeiro.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Fast State-Augmented Learning for Wireless Resource Allocation with Dual Variable Regression

We consider resource allocation problems in multi-user wireless networks, where the goal is to optimize a network-wide utility function subject to constraints on the ergodic average performance of users. We demonstrate how a state-augmented graph neural network (GNN) parametrization for the resource allocation policy circumvents the drawbacks of the ubiquitous dual subgradient methods by representing the network configurations (or states) as graphs and viewing dual variables as dynamic inputs to the model, treated as graph signals supported over the graphs. Lagrangian maximizing state-augmented policies are learned during the offline training phase, and the dual variables evolve through gradient updates while executing the learned state-augmented policies during the inference phase. Our main contributions are to illustrate how near-optimal initialization of dual multipliers for faster inference can be accomplished with dual variable regression, leveraging a secondary GNN parametrization, and how maximization of the Lagrangian over the multipliers sampled from the dual descent dynamics substantially improves the training of state-augmented models. We demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm with extensive numerical experiments in a case study of transmit power control. Finally, we prove a convergence result and an exponential probability bound on the excursions of the dual function (iterate) optimality gaps.

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Long-Horizon Wireless Link Scheduling with State-Augmented Graph Neural Networks

We address optimal link scheduling in large-scale wireless networks. The goal is to schedule transmissions over a time horizon so that to maximize sum rate while ensuring that average rates of each customer attain a minimum rate requirement. To this end, we formulate a constrained optimization problem and solve it using Lagrangian duality. Common primal-dual approaches lead to time invariant policies. Our constraint requires all links transmit a fraction of the time while avoiding interference, which calls for time-varying policies across time slots. We propose an iterative algorithm to sample optimal sequences of schedules and dual variables. The scheduling decisions are parameterized using a Graph Neural Network. We incorporate state-augmentation techniques to learn said parameterization, introducing dual variables as dynamic inputs to the policy. This augmentation enables the GNN to adapt scheduling decisions over time, balancing constraint satisfaction with performance maximization. We validate our approach through extensive numerical simulations, benchmarking against several baselines and considering varying constraint levels.

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Every Sample Counts: Supervised Fine-Tuning of Language Models with Pointwise Constraints

Fine-tuning language models often requires enforcing constraints on individual inputs without compromising downstream performance. Existing constrained alignment methods impose constraints on average, which can induce undesirable disparities across inputs or users. We propose a novel alignment framework that addresses this gap by enforcing per-sample constraints while still minimizing an average loss. To mitigate the impact of overly restrictive constraints and outliers, we introduce a learned, sample-dependent relaxation that minimally adjusts the constraints, trading off a user-defined relaxation cost with the training objective. To address practical duality and optimization challenges, we develop an augmented Lagrangian approach tailored to this formulation. We demonstrate the flexibility of the framework by instantiating it under distinct small language-model fine-tuning tasks and constraints: safety in instruction following, preferences in function calling and length in re-ranking. Across these settings, our approach reduces tail constraint violations while largely preserving the model's performance.

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DiPhon: Diffusion on Graphons for Scalable Graph Generation

Diffusion models represent a leading paradigm for graph generation, with notable impact in domains such as molecular design. Yet, scaling these models to large graphs remains an open problem. We approach this question in the dense-graph setting through the lens of graphons, the size-agnostic limit objects of dense graph sequences, to study how structural graph statistics behave across node-size scales. This perspective leads to DiPhon, a diffusion framework for size-scalable graph generation. Specifically, we formulate a continuous diffusion process on the graphon space via a Jacobi stochastic differential equation (SDE), and propose DiPhon, a discretized graph-level process that mimics these dynamics on finite graphs. We further derive the corresponding reverse-time process, which requires access to the marginal score. For the Jacobi process, this score interestingly admits a tractable form, which we estimate from data via graph denoising and plug into the reverse process to generate graph samples. We prove that DiPhon matches exactly the first moment of the marginal distributions induced by the continuous graphon process, and approximates the second moment up to a closed-form discrepancy. Thus, DiPhon inherits key size-agnostic statistical properties of the graphon dynamics, providing a principled route toward scalable graph generation. Empirically, we demonstrate this scalability by training on small graphs and generating progressively larger graphs at inference time, without retraining, while preserving their core topological properties.

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Generative Diffusion Models of Stochastic Graph Signals

Sampling stochastic signals supported on a graph underlies many graph machine learning tasks, including recommender systems, forecasting in financial markets, and wireless network optimization. In these settings, the target signals are realizations of unknown conditional distributions. However, prevailing approaches rely mostly on intricate, application-tailored designs that often regress to a conditional mean instead of sampling from the conditional law. This paper unifies such problems as conditional graph signal generative modeling and tackles them with a single denoising diffusion framework. We learn a reverse diffusion process, parametrized by graph neural networks (GNNs), that draws graph signals conditioned directly on the graph topology and on node-feature side information. The reverse process is realized by a novel architecture, the U-Graph Neural Network (U-GNN), which generalizes the image-convolutional U-Net to graph-structured signals. The U-GNN performs multi-resolution encoder--decoder processing in which pooling and unpooling reduce to a learned node selection, expressed by nested selection matrices, and a zero-padded lifting of coarse signals back to the full node set. The graph convolutions are carried out on the original graph, with a stride that sets their hop reach, so the U-GNN bypasses explicit graph coarsening at every resolution. We demonstrate our method on two generative tasks: stock price forecasting and optimal wireless resource allocation, with extensive numerical results in both domains.

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A Constrained Optimization Perspective of Unrolled Transformers

We introduce a constrained optimization framework for training transformers that behave like optimization descent algorithms. Specifically, we enforce layerwise descent constraints on the objective function and replace standard empirical risk minimization (ERM) with a primal-dual training scheme. This approach yields models whose intermediate representations decrease the loss monotonically in expectation across layers. We apply our method to both unrolled transformer architectures and conventional pretrained transformers on tasks of video denoising and text classification. Across these settings, we observe constrained transformers achieve stronger robustness to perturbations and maintain higher out-of-distribution generalization, while preserving in-distribution performance.

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Limit Analysis of Graph Neural Networks with Wireless Conflict Graphs

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for wireless resource allocation that leverages the underlying graph structure of communication networks. Their transferability property enables models trained on small-scale graphs to generalize to large-scale deployments with little performance deterioration, a desirable property for currently growing networks. Wireless networks are sparse regimes, where a single node is connected to a small number of other users. This work establishes theoretical results for transferability of GNNs over graphs derived from sparse Random Geometric Graphs (RGGs). In particular, we focus on conflict graphs of RGGs used to model interference among links. Our approach considers the closeness between RGGs and Deterministic Grid Graphs (DGG) to establish bounds in the performance loss when a model is transferred across scales. We validate our theoretical findings through the problem of link scheduling, demonstrating that our learned policies consistently outperform existing benchmarks at scale. Finally, we examine the impact of our theoretical assumptions on empirical performance.

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Unlearning in Diffusion Models: A Unified Framework with KL Divergence and Likelihood Constraints

Unlearning in diffusion models aims to remove undesirable data or concepts while preserving the utility of pretrained models -- two fundamentally conflicting objectives. We propose a principled constrained optimization framework that formulates unlearning as minimizing the deviation from a pretrained model, subject to explicit separation constraints from the unlearning distributions. Specifically, we formulate three constrained optimization problems based on reverse and forward KL divergences, and likelihood constraints. The first two generalize existing approaches for concept and data unlearning, while the third offers a novel and natural formulation for unlearning. Despite the nonconvexity of the KL constraints, we establish strong duality for all three problems, enabling us to explicitly characterize their optimal solutions as unlearning targets and develop primal-dual algorithms for each formulation. Experimental results demonstrate that our KL-constrained approach achieves superior retention-unlearning tradeoffs compared to weight-based baselines for concept and data unlearning, and that our likelihood-based approach matches unlearning effectiveness while better preserving retained concepts compared to baselines.

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Consistent Geometric Deep Learning via Hilbert Bundles and Cellular Sheaves

Modern deep learning architectures increasingly contend with sophisticated signals that are natively infinite-dimensional, such as time series, probability distributions, or operators, and are defined over irregular domains. Yet, a unified learning theory for these settings has been lacking. To start addressing this gap, we introduce a novel convolutional learning framework for possibly infinite-dimensional signals supported on a manifold. Namely, we use the connection Laplacian associated with a Hilbert bundle as a convolutional operator, and we derive filters and neural networks, dubbed as \textit{HilbNets}. We make HilbNets and, more generally, the convolution operation, implementable via a two-stage sampling procedure. First, we show that sampling the manifold induces a Hilbert Cellular Sheaf, a generalized graph structure with Hilbert feature spaces and edge-wise coupling rules, and we prove that its sheaf Laplacian converges in probability to the underlying connection Laplacian as the sampling density increases. Notably, this result is a generalization to the infinite-dimensional bundle setting of the Belkin \& Niyogi \cite{BELKIN20081289} convergence result for the graph Laplacian to the manifold Laplacian, a theoretical cornerstone of geometric learning methods. Second, we discretize the signals and prove that the discretized (implementable) HilbNets converge to the underlying continuous architectures and are transferable across different samplings of the same bundle, providing consistency for learning. Finally, we validate our framework on synthetic and real-world tasks. Overall, our results broaden the scope of geometric learning as a whole by lifting classical Laplacian-based frameworks to settings where the signal at each point lives in its own Hilbert space.

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Scalable Multi Agent Diffusion Policies for Coverage Control

We propose MADP, a novel diffusion-model-based approach for collaboration in decentralized robot swarms. MADP leverages diffusion models to generate samples from complex and high-dimensional action distributions that capture the interdependencies between agents' actions. Each robot conditions policy sampling on a fused representation of its own observations and perceptual embeddings received from peers. To evaluate this approach, we task a team of holonomic robots piloted by MADP to address coverage control-a canonical multi agent navigation problem. The policy is trained via imitation learning from a clairvoyant expert on the coverage control problem, with the diffusion process parameterized by a spatial transformer architecture to enable decentralized inference. We evaluate the system under varying numbers, locations, and variances of importance density functions, capturing the robustness demands of real-world coverage tasks. Experiments demonstrate that our model inherits valuable properties from diffusion models, generalizing across agent densities and environments, and consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.

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Sampling and Uniqueness Sets in Graphon Signal Processing

In this work, we study the properties of sampling sets on families of large graphs by leveraging the theory of graphons and graph limits. To this end, we extend to graphon signals the notion of removable and uniqueness sets, which was developed originally for the analysis of signals on graphs. We state the formal definition of a $Λ-$removable set and conditions under which a bandlimited graphon signal can be represented in a unique way when its samples are obtained from the complement of a given $Λ-$removable set in the graphon. By leveraging such results we show that graphon representations of graphs and graph signals can be used as a common framework to compare sampling sets between graphs with different numbers of nodes and edges, and different node labelings. Additionally, given a sequence of graphs that converges to a graphon, we show that the sequences of sampling sets whose graphon representation is identical in $[0,1]$ are convergent as well. We exploit the convergence results to provide an algorithm that obtains approximately close to optimal sampling sets. Performing a set of numerical experiments, we evaluate the quality of these sampling sets. Our results open the door for the efficient computation of optimal sampling sets in graphs of large size.

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RKHS Representation of Algebraic Convolutional Filters with Integral Operators

Integral operators play a central role in signal processing, underpinning classical convolution, and filtering on continuous network models such as graphons. While these operators are traditionally analyzed through spectral decompositions, their connection to reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) has not been systematically explored within the algebraic signal processing framework. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive theory showing that the range of integral operators naturally induces RKHS convolutional signal models whose reproducing kernels are determined by a box product of the operator symbols. We characterize the algebraic and spectral properties of these induced RKHS and show that polynomial filtering with integral operators corresponds to iterated box products, giving rise to a unital kernel algebra. This perspective yields pointwise RKHS representations of filters via the reproducing property, providing an alternative to operator-based implementations. Our results establish precise connections between eigendecompositions and RKHS representations in graphon signal processing, extend naturally to directed graphons, and enable novel spatial--spectral localization results. Furthermore, we show that when the spectral domain is a subset of the original domain of the signals, optimal filters for regularized learning problems admit finite-dimensional RKHS representations, providing a principled foundation for learnable filters in integral-operator-based neural architectures.

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Unrolled Graph Neural Networks for Constrained Optimization

In this paper, we unroll the dynamics of the dual ascent (DA) algorithm in two coupled graph neural networks (GNNs) to solve constrained optimization problems. The two networks interact with each other at the layer level to find a saddle point of the Lagrangian. The primal GNN finds a stationary point for a given dual multiplier, while the dual network iteratively refines its estimates to reach an optimal solution. We force the primal and dual networks to mirror the dynamics of the DA algorithm by imposing descent and ascent constraints. We propose a joint training scheme that alternates between updating the primal and dual networks. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that our approach yields near-optimal near-feasible solutions and generalizes well to out-of-distribution (OOD) problems.

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Learning Policy Representations for Steerable Behavior Synthesis

Given a Markov decision process (MDP), we seek to learn representations for a range of policies to facilitate behavior steering at test time. As policies of an MDP are uniquely determined by their occupancy measures, we propose modeling policy representations as expectations of state-action feature maps with respect to occupancy measures. We show that these representations can be approximated uniformly for a range of policies using a set-based architecture. Our model encodes a set of state-action samples into a latent embedding, from which we decode both the policy and its value functions corresponding to multiple rewards. We use variational generative approach to induce a smooth latent space, and further shape it with contrastive learning so that latent distances align with differences in value functions. This geometry permits gradient-based optimization directly in the latent space. Leveraging this capability, we solve a novel behavior synthesis task, where policies are steered to satisfy previously unseen value function constraints without additional training.

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Decentralized Learning Strategies for Estimation Error Minimization with Graph Neural Networks

We address real-time sampling and estimation of autoregressive Markovian sources in dynamic yet structurally similar multi-hop wireless networks. Each node caches samples from others and communicates over wireless collision channels, aiming to minimize time-average estimation error via decentralized policies. Due to the high dimensionality of action spaces and complexity of network topologies, deriving optimal policies analytically is intractable. To address this, we propose a graphical multi-agent reinforcement learning framework for policy optimization. Theoretically, we demonstrate that our proposed policies are transferable, allowing a policy trained on one graph to be effectively applied to structurally similar graphs. Numerical experiments demonstrate that (i) our proposed policy outperforms state-of-the-art baselines; (ii) the trained policies are transferable to larger networks, with performance gains increasing with the number of agents; (iii) the graphical training procedure withstands non-stationarity, even when using independent learning techniques; and (iv) recurrence is pivotal in both independent learning and centralized training and decentralized execution, and improves the resilience to non-stationarity.

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Transferable Graphical MARL for Real-Time Estimation in Dynamic Wireless Networks

We study real-time sampling and estimation of autoregressive Markovian sources in decentralized and dynamic multi-hop networks that share similar structures. Nodes cache neighboring samples and communicate over wireless collision channels. The objective is to minimize the time-average estimation error and/or the age of information under decentralized policies, which we address by developing a unified graphical multi-agent reinforcement learning framework. A key feature of the framework is its transferability, enabled by the fact that the number of trainable parameters is independent of the number of agents, allowing a learned policy to be directly deployed on dynamic yet structurally similar graphs without re-training. Building on this design, we establish rigorous theoretical guarantees on the transferability of the resulting policies. Numerical experiments demonstrate that (i) our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on dynamic graphs; (ii) the trained policies transfer well to larger networks, with performance gains increasing with the number of nodes; and (iii) incorporating recurrence is crucial, enhancing resilience to non-stationarity in both independent learning and centralized training with decentralized execution.

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Alignment of large language models with constrained learning

We study the problem of computing an optimal large language model (LLM) policy for the constrained alignment problem, where the goal is to maximize a primary reward objective while satisfying constraints on secondary utilities. Despite the popularity of Lagrangian-based LLM policy search in constrained alignment, iterative primal-dual methods often fail to converge, and non-iterative dual-based methods do not achieve optimality in the LLM parameter space. To address these challenges, we employ Lagrangian duality to develop an iterative dual-based alignment method that alternates between updating the LLM policy via Lagrangian maximization and updating the dual variable via dual descent. In theory, we characterize the primal-dual gap between the primal value in the distribution space and the dual value in the LLM parameter space. We further quantify the optimality gap of the learned LLM policies at near-optimal dual variables with respect to both the objective and the constraint functions. These results prove that dual-based alignment methods can find an optimal constrained LLM policy, up to an LLM parametrization gap. We demonstrate the effectiveness and merits of our approach through extensive experiments conducted on the PKU-SafeRLHF and Anthropic HH-RLHF datasets.

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Composition and Alignment of Diffusion Models using Constrained Learning

Diffusion models have become prevalent in generative modeling due to their ability to sample from complex distributions. To improve the quality of generated samples and their compliance with user requirements, two commonly used methods are: (i) Alignment, which involves finetuning a diffusion model to align it with a reward; and (ii) Composition, which combines several pretrained diffusion models together, each emphasizing a desirable attribute in the generated outputs. However, trade-offs often arise when optimizing for multiple rewards or combining multiple models, as they can often represent competing properties. Existing methods cannot guarantee that the resulting model faithfully generates samples with all the desired properties. To address this gap, we propose a constrained optimization framework that unifies alignment and composition of diffusion models by enforcing that the aligned model satisfies reward constraints and/or remains close to each pretrained model. We provide a theoretical characterization of the solutions to the constrained alignment and composition problems and develop a Lagrangian-based primal-dual training algorithm to approximate these solutions. Empirically, we demonstrate our proposed approach in image generation, applying it to alignment and composition, and show that our aligned or composed model satisfies constraints effectively. Our implementation can be found at: \href{https://github.com/shervinkhalafi/constrained_comp_align}{https://github.com/shervinkhalafi/constrained\_comp\_align}

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