English
Related papers

Related papers: A Combinatorial Problem Arising From Ecology: the …

200 papers

The family of $(k, \ell)$-sparse graphs, introduced by Lorea, plays a central role in combinatorial optimization and has a wide range of applications, particularly in rigidity theory. A key algorithmic challenge is to compute a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Bence Deák , Péter Madarasi

Energy storage is expected to play an increasingly important role in mitigating variations that come along with the growing penetration of renewable energy. In this paper, we study the optimal bidding of an energy storage unit in a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-29 Yue Chen , Wei Wei , Tongxin Li , Yunhe Hou , Feng Liu , João P. S. Catalão

We study the optimal contract problem in the \emph{combinatorial actions} framework of D\"utting et al.~[FOCS'21], where a principal delegates a project to an agent who chooses a subset of hidden, costly actions, and the resulting reward is…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Michal Feldman , Liat Yashin

After more than a century of concerted effort, physics still lacks basic principles of spontaneous self-organization. To appreciate why, we first state the problem, outline historical approaches, and survey the present state of the physics…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-11-27 Adam T. Rupe , James P. Crutchfield

Maximum entropy modeling is a flexible and popular framework for formulating statistical models given partial knowledge. In this paper, rather than the traditional method of optimizing over the continuous density directly, we learn a smooth…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-05-01 Gabriel Loaiza-Ganem , Yuanjun Gao , John P. Cunningham

We present herein a new approach based on the simultaneous application of the deep learning and statistical physics methods to solve the combinatorial optimization problems. The recent modern advanced techniques, such as an artificial…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2019-11-26 Semyon Sinchenko , Dmitry Bazhanov

We study the maximal amount of energy that can be extracted from a finite quantum system by means of projective measurements. For this quantity we coin the expression "metrotropy" $\mathcal{M}$, in analogy with "ergotropy" $\mathcal{W}$,…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-09-10 Andrea Solfanelli , Lorenzo Buffoni , Alessandro Cuccoli , Michele Campisi

Maximum quantum work extraction is generally defined in terms of the ergotropy functional, no matter how experimentally complicated is the implementation of the optimal unitary allowing for it, especially in the case of multipartite…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-01-27 Riccardo Castellano , Ranieri Nery , Kyrylo Simonov , Donato Farina

Extremal principles are fundamental in our interpretation of phenomena in nature. One of the best known examples is the second law of thermodynamics, governing most physical and chemical systems and stating the continuous increase of…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Dirk Helbing , Tamas Vicsek

Quantifying the ergotropy (a.k.a. available energy), namely the maximal amount of energy that can be extracted from a thermally isolated system, is a central problem in quantum thermodynamics. Notably, the same problem has been long studied…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-05-19 Michele Campisi

This letter considers optimizing user association in a heterogeneous network via utility maximization, which is a combinatorial optimization problem due to integer constraints. Different from existing solutions based on convex optimization,…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-06-12 Xietian Huang , Wei Xu , Guo Xie , Shi Jin , Xiaohu You

Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, serving as a useful pretraining objective for data collection, particularly when an external reward function is unavailable. A principled formulation of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Jacob Adamczyk , Adam Kamoski , Rahul V. Kulkarni

We study the maximum set coverage problem in the massively parallel model. In this setting, $m$ sets that are subsets of a universe of $n$ elements are distributed among $m$ machines. In each round, these machines can communicate with each…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Thai Bui , Hoa T. Vu

Simplified mechanistic models in ecology have been criticized for the fact that a good fit to data does not imply the mechanism is true: pattern does not equal process. In parallel, the maximum entropy principle (MaxEnt) has been applied in…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2017-05-02 James P. O'Dwyer , Andrew Rominger , Xiao Xiao

Extremal principles can generally be divided into two rather distinct classes. There are, on the one hand side, formulations based on the Lagrangian or Hamiltonian mechanics, respectively, dealing with time dependent problems, but…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Klaus Hackl , Jiří Svoboda , Franz Dieter Fischer

We exploit the idea to use the maximal-entropy method, successfully tested in information theory and statistical thermodynamics, to determine approximating function's coefficients and squared errors' weights simultaneously as output of one…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-03-04 Domenico Giordano , Felice Iavernaro

A \emph{new} notion of equilibrium, which we call \emph{strong equilibrium}, is introduced for time-inconsistent stopping problems in continuous time. Compared to the existing notions introduced in ArXiv: 1502.03998 and ArXiv: 1709.05181,…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2020-10-02 Erhan Bayraktar , Jingjie Zhang , Zhou Zhou

A classical longstanding open problem in statistics is finding an explicit expression for the probability measure which maximizes entropy with respect to given constraints. In this paper a solution to this problem is found, using…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-03-14 Tomer M. Schlank , Ran J. Tessler , Amitai Netser Zernik

In this work, we consider optimal control problems for mechanical systems on vector spaces with fixed initial and free final state and a quadratic Lagrange term. Specifically, the dynamics is described by a second order ODE containing an…

The influence maximization (IM) problem aims at finding a subset of seed nodes in a social network that maximize the spread of influence. In this study, we focus on a sub-class of IM problems, where whether the nodes are willing to be the…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Haipeng Chen , Wei Qiu , Han-Ching Ou , Bo An , Milind Tambe