Estimating distributions over large alphabets is a fundamental machine-learning tenet. Yet no method is known to estimate all distributions well. For example, add-constant estimators are nearly min-max optimal but often perform poorly in practice, and practical estimators such as absolute discounting, Jelinek-Mercer, and Good-Turing are not known to be near optimal for essentially any distribution.We describe the first universally near-optimal probability estimators. For every discrete distribution, they are provably nearly the best in the following two competitive ways. First they estimate every distribution nearly as well as the best estimator designed with prior knowledge of the distribution up to a permutation. Second, they estimate every distribution nearly as well as the best estimator designed with prior knowledge of the exact distribution, but as all natural estimators, restricted to assign the same probability to all symbols appearing the same number of times.Specifically, for distributions over $k$ symbols and $n$ samples, we show that for both comparisons, a simple variant of Good-Turing estimator is always within KL divergence of $(3+o(1))/n^{1/3}$ from the best estimator, and that a more involved estimator is within $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\min(k/n,1/\sqrt n))$. Conversely, we show that any estimator must have a KL divergence $\ge\tilde\Omega(\min(k/n,1/ n^{2/3}))$ over the best estimator for the first comparison, and $\ge\tilde\Omega(\min(k/n,1/\sqrt{n}))$ for the second.

We show that natural classes of regularized learning algorithms with a form of recency bias achieve faster convergence rates to approximate efficiency and to coarse correlated equilibria in multiplayer normal form games. When each player in a game uses an algorithm from our class, their individual regret decays at $O(T^{-3/4})$, while the sum of utilities converges to an approximate optimum at $O(T^{-1})$--an improvement upon the worst case $O(T^{-1/2})$ rates. We show a black-box reduction for any algorithm in the class to achieve $\tilde{O}(T^{-1/2})$ rates against an adversary, while maintaining the faster rates against algorithms in the class. Our results extend those of Rakhlin and Shridharan~\cite{Rakhlin2013} and Daskalakis et al.~\cite{Daskalakis2014}, who only analyzed two-player zero-sum games for specific algorithms.

We present a method for training recurrent neural networks to act as near-optimal feedback controllers. It is able to generate stable and realistic behaviors for a range of dynamical systems and tasks -- swimming, flying, biped and quadruped walking with different body morphologies. It does not require motion capture or task-specific features or state machines. The controller is a neural network, having a large number of feed-forward units that learn elaborate state-action mappings, and a small number of recurrent units that implement memory states beyond the physical system state. The action generated by the network is defined as velocity. Thus the network is not learning a control policy, but rather the dynamics under an implicit policy. Essential features of the method include interleaving supervised learning with trajectory optimization, injecting noise during training, training for unexpected changes in the task specification, and using the trajectory optimizer to obtain optimal feedback gains in addition to optimal actions.