Related papers: Setting Lower Bounds on Truthfulness
We study weakest precondition reasoning about the (co)variance of outcomes and the variance of run-times of probabilistic programs with conditioning. For outcomes, we show that approximating (co)variances is computationally more difficult…
Weak submodularity is a natural relaxation of the diminishing return property, which is equivalent to submodularity. Weak submodularity has been used to show that many (monotone) functions that arise in practice can be efficiently maximized…
Many major works in social science employ matching to make causal conclusions, but different matches on the same data may produce different treatment effect estimates, even when they achieve similar balance or minimize the same loss…
We present a new inductive rule for verifying lower bounds on expected values of random variables after execution of probabilistic loops as well as on their expected runtimes. Our rule is simple in the sense that loop body semantics need to…
This paper addresses the scheduling problem in mobile social networks. We begin by proving that the approximation ratio analysis presented in the paper by Zhang \textit{et al.} (IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2025) is incorrect, and…
We study the mechanism design problem of allocating a set of indivisible items without monetary transfers. Despite the vast literature on this very standard model, it still remains unclear how do truthful mechanisms look like. We focus on…
There is a long history of approximation schemes for the problem of scheduling jobs on identical machines to minimize the makespan. Such a scheme grants a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation solution for every $\epsilon > 0$, but the running time…
Submodular optimization plays a key role in many real-world problems. In many real-world scenarios, it is also necessary to handle uncertainty, and potentially disruptive events that violate constraints in stochastic settings need to be…
A key trait of stochastic optimizers is that multiple runs of the same optimizer in attempting to solve the same problem can produce different results. As a result, their performance is evaluated over several repeats, or runs, on the…
State-of-the-art posted-price mechanisms for submodular bidders with $m$ items achieve approximation guarantees of $O((\log \log m)^3)$ [Assadi and Singla, 2019]. Their truthfulness, however, requires bidders to compute an NP-hard…
The design of algorithms or protocols that are able to align the goals of the planner with the selfish interests of the agents involved in these protocols is of paramount importance in almost every decentralized setting (such as, computer…
A deterministic approximation algorithm is presented for the maximization of non-monotone submodular functions over a ground set of size $n$ subject to cardinality constraint $k$; the algorithm is based upon the idea of interlacing two…
We develop a practical and novel method for inference on intersection bounds, namely bounds defined by either the infimum or supremum of a parametric or nonparametric function, or equivalently, the value of a linear programming problem with…
The reliable fraction of information is an attractive score for quantifying (functional) dependencies in high-dimensional data. In this paper, we systematically explore the algorithmic implications of using this measure for optimization. We…
Latent truth discovery, LTD for short, refers to the problem of aggregating ltiple claims from various sources in order to estimate the plausibility of atements about entities. In the absence of a ground truth, this problem is highly…
We consider the power to reject false values of the parameter in Frequentist methods for the calculation of confidence intervals. We connect the power with the physical significance (reliability) of confidence intervals for a parameter…
With the growing adoption of machine learning (ML) systems in areas like law enforcement, criminal justice, finance, hiring, and admissions, it is increasingly critical to guarantee the fairness of decisions assisted by ML. In this paper,…
One of the classic results in scheduling theory is the 2-approximation algorithm by Lenstra, Shmoys, and Tardos for the problem of scheduling jobs to minimize makespan on unrelated machines, i.e., job j requires time p_{ij} if processed on…
It is typically expected that if a mechanism is truthful, then the agents would, indeed, truthfully report their private information. But why would an agent believe that the mechanism is truthful? We wish to design truthful mechanisms,…
We consider the obnoxious facility location problem (in which agents prefer the facility location to be far from them) and propose a hierarchy of distance-based proportional fairness concepts for the problem. These fairness axioms ensure…