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Optimization under uncertainty deals with the problem of optimizing stochastic cost functions given some partial information on their inputs. These problems are extremely difficult to solve and yet pervade all areas of technological and…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-03-13 Fabrizio Altarelli , Alfredo Braunstein , Abolfazl Ramezanpour , Riccardo Zecchina

We consider the problem of sequentially making decisions that are rewarded by "successes" and "failures" which can be predicted through an unknown relationship that depends on a partially controllable vector of attributes for each instance.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-18 Yingfei Wang , Chu Wang , Warren Powell

The coordinated and efficient distribution of limited resources by individual decisions is a fundamental, unsolved problem. When individuals compete for road capacities, time, space, money, goods, etc., they normally make decisions based on…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-07 Dirk Helbing , Martin Schoenhof , Daniel Kern

This article describes a model and an exact solution method for facility location problems with decision-dependent uncertainties. The model allows characterizing the probability distribution of the random elements as a function of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-15 Giovanni Pantuso

Recently, it has been shown how sampling actions from the predictive distribution over the optimal action-sometimes called Thompson sampling-can be applied to solve sequential adaptive control problems, when the optimal policy is known for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-09-24 Pedro A. Ortega , Daniel A. Braun

We characterize the identified sets of a wide range of stochastic choice models, including random utility, various models of boundedly-rational behavior, and dynamic discrete choice. In each of these settings, we show two distributions over…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-24 Peter Caradonna , Christopher Turansick

This work develops effective distributed strategies for the solution of constrained multi-agent stochastic optimization problems with coupled parameters across the agents. In this formulation, each agent is influenced by only a subset of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-03-15 Sulaiman A. Alghunaim , Ali H. Sayed

The ranking and selection problem is a popular framework in the simulation literature for studying optimal information collection. We study a version of this problem in which the simulation output for each design is normally distributed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-03 Jianzhong Du , Ilya O. Ryzhov , Siyang Gao

The execution time of programs is a key element in many areas of computer science, mainly those where achieving good performance (e.g., scheduling in cloud computing) or a predictable one (e.g., meeting deadlines in embedded systems) is the…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2020-07-13 Matheus Henrique Junqueira Saldanha

We study an optimal control problem in which both the objective function and the dynamic constraint contain an uncertain parameter. Since the distribution of this uncertain parameter is not exactly known, the objective function is taken as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-11-29 Jianxiong Ye , Lei Wang , Changzhi Wu , Jie Sun , Kok Lay Teo , Xiangyu Wang

In multi-period stochastic optimization problems, the future optimal decision is a random variable whose distribution depends on the parameters of the optimization problem. We analyze how the expected value of this random variable changes…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-28 Bar Light

Organisms and ecological groups accumulate evidence to make decisions. Classic experiments and theoretical studies have explored this process when the correct choice is fixed during each trial. However, we live in a constantly changing…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2015-10-01 Alan Veliz-Cuba , Zachary P. Kilpatrick , Kresimir Josic

We consider a decision maker who must choose an action in order to maximize a reward function that depends also on an unknown parameter {\Theta}. The decision maker can delay taking the action in order to experiment and gather additional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-22 Victor F. Araman , Rene Caldentey

Motivated by applications where impatience is pervasive and evaluation times are uncertain, we study a selection model where options may expire at an unknown point in time and evaluation times are stochastic. Initially, the decision-maker…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-05 Yihua Xu , Rohan Ghuge , Sebastian Perez-Salazar

We study the problem of agent selection in causal strategic learning under multiple decision makers and address two key challenges that come with it. Firstly, while much of prior work focuses on studying a fixed pool of agents that remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Kiet Q. H. Vo , Muneeb Aadil , Siu Lun Chau , Krikamol Muandet

Methods for learning optimal policies in autonomous agents often assume that the way the domain is conceptualised---its possible states and actions and their causal structure---is known in advance and does not change during learning. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-01-11 Craig Innes , Alex Lascarides , Stefano V Albrecht , Subramanian Ramamoorthy , Benjamin Rosman

Possibility theory is proposed as an uncertainty representation framework for distributed learning in multi-agent systems and robot swarms. In particular, we investigate its application to the best-of-n problem where the aim is for a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Jonathan Lawry , Michael Crosscombe , David Harvey

Optimization of decision problems in stochastic environments is usually concerned with maximizing the probability of achieving the goal and minimizing the expected episode length. For interacting agents in time-critical applications,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Balint Takacs , Istvan Szita , Andras Lorincz

We consider the problem of designing a sequential decision making agent to maximize an unknown time-varying function which switches with time. At each step, the agent receives an observation of the function's value at a point decided by the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-07 Durgesh Kalwar , Vineeth B. S

We solve a sequential decision-making problem under uncertainty that takes into account the failure probability of a task. This problem cannot be handled by the stochastic shortest path problem, which is the standard model for sequential…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-26 Ritsusamuel Otsubo