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David B. Emerson

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2 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

MEMOA: Massive Mixtures of Online Agents via Mean-Field Decentralized Nash Equilibria

In the modern age of large-scale AI, federated learning has become an increasingly important tool for training large populations of AI agents; however, its computational and communication costs can rapidly fail to scale with the number of agents. This is precisely where decentralized agentic strategies shine: each agent acts autonomously, using only its own state together with a minimal summary of the ensemble, namely the mean-field. We derive the unique optimal decentralized policy in closed form. Optimality is characterized through a worst-client/minimax criterion: minimizing the under-performer regret, namely the maximal online cost incurred by the weakest agent in the ensemble. We further prove that the resulting decentralized policy asymptotically converges, in the large-population limit, to the Nash-optimal centralized policy, whose direct computation is not scalable. We use an online weighting mechanism to optimize the server-computed mixture of client predictions, thereby improving the mean prediction in addition to the previously optimized weakest-client prediction. Numerical experiments verify our theoretical guarantees and demonstrate that our decentralized policy typically outperforms natural greedy decentralized baselines.

preprint2015arXiv

Competition of Lattice and Basis for Alignment of Nematic Liquid Crystals

Due to elastic anisotropy, two-dimensional patterning of substrates can promote weak azimuthal alignment of adjacent nematic liquid crystals. Here, we consider how such alignment can be achieved using a periodic square lattice of circular or elliptical motifs. In particular, we examine ways in which the lattice and motif can compete to favor differing orientations. Using Monte Carlo simulation and continuum elasticity we find, for circular motifs, an orientational transition depending on the coverage fraction. If the circles are generalised to ellipses, arbitrary control of the effective alignment direction and anchoring energy becomes achievable by appropriate tuning of the ellipse motif relative to the periodic lattice patterning. This has possible applications in both monostable and bi-stable liquid crystal device contexts.