Related papers: Minimum Guesswork with an Unreliable Oracle
We study the problem of discrete distribution testing in the two-party setting. For example, in the standard closeness testing problem, Alice and Bob each have $t$ samples from, respectively, distributions $a$ and $b$ over $[n]$, and they…
A general many quantiles + noise model is studied in the robust formulation (allowing non-normal, non-independent observations), where the identifiability requirement for the noise is formulated in terms of quantiles rather than the…
In the distributional Twenty Questions game, Bob chooses a number $x$ from $1$ to $n$ according to a distribution $\mu$, and Alice (who knows $\mu$) attempts to identify $x$ using Yes/No questions, which Bob answers truthfully. Her goal is…
We consider the following communication problem: Alice and Bob each have some valuation functions $v_1(\cdot)$ and $v_2(\cdot)$ over subsets of $m$ items, and their goal is to partition the items into $S, \bar{S}$ in a way that maximizes…
Sorting has a natural generalization where the input consists of: (1) a ground set $X$ of size $n$, (2) a partial oracle $O_P$ specifying some fixed partial order $P$ on $X$ and (3) a linear oracle $O_L$ specifying a linear order $L$ that…
We study the role of costly information in non-cooperative two-player games when an extrinsic third party information broker is introduced asymmetrically, allowing one player to obtain information about the other player's action. This…
The game of best choice (or "secretary problem") is a model for making an irrevocable decision among a fixed number of candidate choices that are presented sequentially in random order, one at a time. Because the classically optimal…
In this paper, we consider lower bounds on the query complexity for testing CSPs in the bounded-degree model. First, for any ``symmetric'' predicate $P:{0,1}^{k} \to {0,1}$ except \equ where $k\geq 3$, we show that every (randomized)…
We study the dynamics of repeated fair division between two players, Alice and Bob, where Alice partitions a cake into two subsets and Bob chooses his preferred one over $T$ rounds. Alice aims to minimize her regret relative to the…
It is well known that no quantum bit commitment protocol is unconditionally secure. Nonetheless, there can be non-trivial upper bounds on both Bob's probability of correctly estimating Alice's commitment and Alice's probability of…
In statistical decision theory involving a single decision-maker, an information structure is said to be better than another one if for any cost function involving a hidden state variable and an action variable which is restricted to be…
We consider the problem of zero-error function computation with side information. Alice and Bob have correlated sources $X,Y$ with joint p.m.f. $p_{XY}(\cdot, \cdot)$. Bob wants to calculate $f(X,Y)$ with zero error. Alice encodes…
Given two sets A and B and two oracles O(A) and O(B) that can identify the elements of these sets respectively, the goal is to find an element common to both sets using minimum number of oracle queries. Each application of either O(A) or…
In the oracle identification problem, we are given oracle access to an unknown N-bit string x promised to belong to a known set C of size M and our task is to identify x. We present a quantum algorithm for the problem that is optimal in its…
The Hamming oracle returns the Hamming distance between an unknown binary $n$-vector $x$ and a binary query $n$-vector y. The objective is to determine $x$ uniquely using a sequence of $m$ queries. What are the minimum number of queries…
In this paper, we address the problem of testing exchangeability of a sequence of random variables, $X_1, X_2,\cdots$. This problem has been studied under the recently popular framework of testing by betting. But the mapping of testing…
The classical binary hypothesis testing problem is revisited. We notice that when one of the hypotheses is composite, there is an inherent difficulty in defining an optimality criterion that is both informative and well-justified. For…
We study coalitional games with exogenous uncertainty in the coalition value, in which each agent is allowed to have private samples of the uncertainty. As a consequence, the agents may have a different perception of stability of the grand…
We consider a situation where one has to choose an option with multiplier m. The multiplier is inversely proportional to the number of people who have chosen the option and is proportional to the return if it is correct. If one does not…
Weak coin flipping is the cryptographic task where Alice and Bob remotely flip a coin but want opposite outcomes. This work studies this task in the device-independent regime where Alice and Bob neither trust each other, nor their quantum…