Related papers: Faster Treasure Hunt and Better Strongly Universal…
We consider the contextual bandit problem, where a player sequentially makes decisions based on past observations to maximize the cumulative reward. Although many algorithms have been proposed for contextual bandit, most of them rely on…
Inferential decision-making algorithms typically assume that an underlying probabilistic model of decision alternatives and outcomes may be learned a priori or online. Furthermore, when applied to robots in real-world settings they often…
A recent breakthrough by K\"unnemann, Mazowiecki, Sch\"utze, Sinclair-Banks, and Wegrzycki (ICALP, 2023) bounds the running time for the coverability problem in $d$-dimensional vector addition systems under unary encoding to $n^{2^{O(d)}}$,…
Spatial search is the problem of finding a marked vertex in a graph. A continuous-time quantum walk in the single-excitation subspace of an $n$ spin system solves the problem of spatial search by finding the marked vertex in $O(\sqrt{n})$…
Decision Tree is a classic formulation of active learning: given $n$ hypotheses with nonnegative weights summing to 1 and a set of tests that each partition the hypotheses, output a decision tree using the provided tests that uniquely…
We study the problem of contextual search, a multidimensional generalization of binary search that captures many problems in contextual decision-making. In contextual search, a learner is trying to learn the value of a hidden vector $v \in…
Autonomous robots are commonly tasked with the problem of area exploration and search for certain targets or artifacts of interest to be tracked. Traditionally, the problem formulation considered is that of complete search and thus -…
Similar subtrajectory search is a finer-grained operator that can better capture the similarities between one query trajectory and a portion of a data trajectory than the traditional similar trajectory search, which requires the two checked…
We introduce exponential search trees as a novel technique for converting static polynomial space search structures for ordered sets into fully-dynamic linear space data structures. This leads to an optimal bound of O(sqrt(log n/loglog n))…
In collective tree exploration, a team of $k$ mobile agents is tasked to go through all edges of an unknown tree as fast as possible. An edge of the tree is revealed to the team when one agent becomes adjacent to that edge. The agents start…
Boltzmann exploration is a classic strategy for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, and is one of the most standard tools in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Despite its widespread use, there is virtually no theoretical understanding…
The NP-complete Permutation Pattern Matching problem asks whether a $k$-permutation $P$ is contained in a $n$-permutation $T$ as a pattern. This is the case if there exists an order-preserving embedding of $P$ into $T$. In this paper, we…
In the online (time-series) search problem, a player is presented with a sequence of prices which are revealed in an online manner. In the standard definition of the problem, for each revealed price, the player must decide irrevocably…
In a rendezvous task, some mobile agents dispersed in a network have to gather at an arbitrary common site. We consider the rendezvous problem on the infinite labeled line, with $2$ agents, without communication, and a synchronous notion of…
Moving an autonomous agent through an unknown environment is one of the crucial problems for robotics and network analysis. Therefore, it received a lot of attention in the last decades and was analyzed in many different settings. The graph…
Initial knowledge regarding group size can be crucial for collective performance. We study this relation in the context of the {\em Ants Nearby Treasure Search (ANTS)} problem \cite{FKLS}, which models natural cooperative foraging behavior…
We revisit the linear search problem where a robot, initially placed at the origin on an infinite line, tries to locate a stationary target placed at an unknown position on the line. Unlike previous studies, in which the robot travels along…
Two mobile agents, starting from different nodes of a network at possibly different times, have to meet at the same node. This problem is known as $\mathit{rendezvous}$. Agents move in synchronous rounds. Each agent has a distinct integer…
We tackle two long-standing problems related to re-expansions in heuristic search algorithms. For graph search, A* can require $\Omega(2^{n})$ expansions, where $n$ is the number of states within the final $f$ bound. Existing algorithms…
We investigate hide-and-seek games on complex networks using a random walk framework. Specifically, we investigate the efficiency of various degree-biased random walk search strategies to locate items that are randomly hidden on a subset of…