Related papers: Sequential Selection of Correlated Ads by POMDPs
Pay-per-click advertising includes various formats (\emph{e.g.}, search, contextual, social) with a total investment of more than 200 billion USD per year worldwide. An advertiser is given a daily budget to allocate over several, even…
In contemporary e-commerce platforms, search result pages display two types of items: ad items and organic items. Ad items are determined through an advertising auction system, while organic items are selected by a recommendation system.…
This paper introduces algorithms for problems where a decision maker has to control a system composed of several components and has access to only partial information on the state of each component. Such problems are difficult because of…
Many processes, such as discrete event systems in engineering or population dynamics in biology, evolve in discrete space and continuous time. We consider the problem of optimal decision making in such discrete state and action space…
Online bipartite matching is a fundamental problem in online optimization, extensively studied both in its integral and fractional forms due to its theoretical significance and practical applications, such as online advertising and resource…
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…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are stochastic optimization problems that model situations where a decision maker controls a system based on its state. Partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are generalizations of MDPs where…
Online advertising has recently grown into a highly competitive and complex multi-billion-dollar industry, with advertisers bidding for ad slots at large scales and high frequencies. This has resulted in a growing need for efficient…
Internet advertising is a sophisticated game in which the many advertisers "play" to optimize their return on investment. There are many "targets" for the advertisements, and each "target" has a collection of games with a potentially…
Robots operating in real-world environments must reason about possible outcomes of stochastic actions and make decisions based on partial observations of the true world state. A major challenge for making accurate and robust action…
When human operators of cyber-physical systems encounter surprising behavior, they often consider multiple hypotheses that might explain it. In some cases, taking information-gathering actions such as additional measurements or control…
Information theory has been very successful in obtaining performance limits for various problems such as communication, compression and hypothesis testing. Likewise, stochastic control theory provides a characterization of optimal policies…
In this review/tutorial article, we present recent progress on optimal control of partially observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). We first present regularity and continuity conditions for POMDPs and their belief-MDP reductions, where…
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a natural and general model in reinforcement learning that take into account the agent's uncertainty about its current state. In the literature on POMDPs, it is customary to assume…
We study Stochastic Online Correlated Selection (SOCS), a family of online rounding algorithms for Non-IID Stochastic Online Submodular Welfare Maximization and special cases such as Online Stochastic Matching, Stochastic AdWords, and…
While page views are often sold instantly through real-time auctions when users visit websites, they can also be sold in advance via guaranteed contracts. In this paper, we present a dynamic programming model to study how an online…
We present an alternative view for the study of optimal control of partially observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). We first revisit the traditional (and by now standard) separated-design method of reducing the problem to fully…
Motivated by programmatic advertising optimization, we consider the task of sequentially allocating budget across a set of resources. At every time step, a feasible allocation is chosen and only a corresponding random return is observed.…
We present a data-driven algorithm that advertisers can use to automate their digital ad-campaigns at online publishers. The algorithm enables the advertiser to search across available target audiences and ad-media to find the best possible…
In this paper, we propose a policy gradient method for confounded partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces in the offline setting. We first establish a novel identification result…