Related papers: Pandora's Problem with Nonobligatory Inspection
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…
While dynamic policies have historically formed the foundation of most influential papers dedicated to the joint replenishment problem, we are still facing profound gaps in our structural understanding of optimal such policies as well as in…
We study offline constrained reinforcement learning with general function approximation in discounted constrained Markov decision processes. Prior methods either require full data coverage for evaluating intermediate policies, lack oracle…
We initiate a systematic study of utilizing predictions to improve over approximation guarantees of classic algorithms, without increasing the running time. We propose a systematic method for a wide class of optimization problems that ask…
The Prophet Inequality and Pandora's Box problems are fundamental stochastic problem with applications in Mechanism Design, Online Algorithms, Stochastic Optimization, Optimal Stopping, and Operations Research. A usual assumption in these…
We explore the question of how to learn an optimal search strategy within the example of a parking problem where parking opportunities arrive according to an unknown inhomogeneous Poisson process. The optimal policy is a threshold-type…
We model search in settings where decision makers know what can be found but not where to find it. A searcher faces a set of choices arranged by an observable attribute. Each period, she either selects a choice and pays a cost to learn…
We formulate the problem of fair and efficient completion of indivisible goods, defined as follows: Given a partial allocation of indivisible goods among agents, does there exist an allocation of the remaining goods (i.e., a completion)…
We study an online version of the max-min fair allocation problem for indivisible items. In this problem, items arrive one by one, and each item must be allocated irrevocably on arrival to one of $n$ agents, who have additive valuations for…
A popular perspective in Reinforcement learning (RL) casts the problem as probabilistic inference on a graphical model of the Markov decision process (MDP). The core object of study is the probability of each state-action pair being visited…
We consider online convex optimization with a zero-order oracle feedback. In particular, the decision maker does not know the explicit representation of the time-varying cost functions, or their gradients. At each time step, she observes…
We study the Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL) problem using the Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) formulation in which an agent aims to maximize the expected total reward subject to a safety constraint on the expected total value…
Solving optimal stopping problems by backward induction in high dimensions is often very complex since the computation of conditional expectations is required. Typically, such computations are based on regression, a method that suffers from…
While powerful tools have been developed to analyze quantum query complexity, there are still many natural problems that do not fit neatly into the black box model of oracles. We create a new model that allows multiple oracles with…
We study the problem of setting a price for a potential buyer with a valuation drawn from an unknown distribution $D$. The seller has "data"' about $D$ in the form of $m \ge 1$ i.i.d. samples, and the algorithmic challenge is to use these…
We study policy optimization in an infinite horizon, $\gamma$-discounted constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). Our objective is to return a policy that achieves large expected reward with a small constraint violation. We consider the…
Choosing optimal (or at least better) policies is an important problem in domains from medicine to education to finance and many others. One approach to this problem is through controlled experiments/trials - but controlled experiments are…
We study online secretary problems with returns in combinatorial packing domains with $n$ candidates that arrive sequentially over time in random order. The goal is to accept a feasible packing of candidates of maximum total value. In the…
Lengthy evaluation times are common in many optimization problems such as direct policy search tasks, especially when they involve conducting evaluations in the physical world, e.g. in robotics applications. Often when evaluating solution…
Matrix factorization is a popular approach for large-scale matrix completion. The optimization formulation based on matrix factorization can be solved very efficiently by standard algorithms in practice. However, due to the non-convexity…