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We study the problem of sorting under incomplete information, when queries are used to resolve uncertainties. Each of $n$ data items has an unknown value, which is known to lie in a given interval. We can pay a query cost to learn the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-04-16 Magnús M. Halldórsson , Murilo S. de Lima

Safe reinforcement learning aims to learn the optimal policy while satisfying safety constraints, which is essential in real-world applications. However, current algorithms still struggle for efficient policy updates with hard constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Linrui Zhang , Li Shen , Long Yang , Shixiang Chen , Bo Yuan , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

For effective decision support in scenarios with conflicting objectives, sets of potentially optimal solutions can be presented to the decision maker. We explore both what policies these sets should contain and how such sets can be computed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-19 Willem Röpke , Conor F. Hayes , Patrick Mannion , Enda Howley , Ann Nowé , Diederik M. Roijers

We study the Second Price Matching problem, introduced by Azar, Birnbaum, Karlin, and Nguyen in 2009. In this problem, a bipartite graph (bidders and goods) is given, and the profit of a matching is the number of matches containing a second…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Rom Pinchasi , Neta Singer , Lukas Vogl , Jiaye Wei

In the secretary problem, a set of secretary candidates arrive in a uniformly random order and reveal their values one by one. A company, who can only hire one candidate and hopes to maximize the expected value of its hire, needs to make…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Mohammad Mahdian , Jieming Mao , Enze Sun , Kangning Wang , Yifan Wang

Decision-making problems in uncertain or stochastic domains are often formulated as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Policy iteration (PI) is a popular algorithm for searching over policy-space, the size of which is exponential in the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Yishay Mansour , Satinder Singh

We consider the dynamic inventory problem with non-stationary demands. It has long been known that non-stationary (s, S) policies are optimal for this problem. However, finding optimal policy parameters remains a computational challenge as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-20 Onur A. Kilic , S. Armagan Tarim

In the online (time-series) search problem, a player is presented with a sequence of prices which are revealed in an online manner. In the standard definition of the problem, for each revealed price, the player must decide irrevocably…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Spyros Angelopoulos , Shahin Kamali , Dehou Zhang

We introduce the first direct policy search algorithm which provably converges to the globally optimal $\textit{dynamic}$ filter for the classical problem of predicting the outputs of a linear dynamical system, given noisy, partial…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-01 Jack Umenberger , Max Simchowitz , Juan C. Perdomo , Kaiqing Zhang , Russ Tedrake

The value maximization version of the secretary problem is the problem of hiring a candidate with the largest value from a randomly ordered sequence of candidates. In this work, we consider a setting where predictions of candidate values…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Kaito Fujii , Yuichi Yoshida

We study the Pandora's Box problem in an online learning setting with semi-bandit feedback. In each round, the learner sequentially pays to open up to $n$ boxes with unknown reward distributions, observes rewards upon opening, and decides…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Junyan Liu , Ziyun Chen , Kun Wang , Haipeng Luo , Lillian J. Ratliff

This paper studies a search problem where a consumer is initially aware of only a few products. At every point in time, the consumer then decides between searching among alternatives he is already aware of and discovering more products. I…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-02-21 Rafael P. Greminger

We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-12 Jerome Taupin , Yassir Jedra , Alexandre Proutiere

We introduce and study constrained Markov Decision Processes (cMDPs) with anytime constraints. An anytime constraint requires the agent to never violate its budget at any point in time, almost surely. Although Markovian policies are no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Jeremy McMahan , Xiaojin Zhu

We study \emph{combinatorial procurement auctions}, where a buyer with a valuation function $v$ and budget $B$ wishes to buy a set of items. Each item $i$ has a cost $c_i$ and the buyer is interested in a set $S$ that maximizes $v(S)$…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Ashwinkumar Badanidiyuru , Shahar Dobzinski , Sigal Oren

Reward-free exploration is a reinforcement learning setting studied by Jin et al. (2020), who address it by running several algorithms with regret guarantees in parallel. In our work, we instead give a more natural adaptive approach for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Emilie Kaufmann , Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

Recently, Frazier et al. proposed a natural model for crowdsourced exploration of different a priori unknown options: a principal is interested in the long-term welfare of a population of agents who arrive one by one in a multi-armed bandit…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-12-29 Li Han , David Kempe , Ruixin Qiang

We give an attribution method for neural combinatorial-optimisation (CO) policies that (i) decomposes a decision by constraint families via LP-relaxation duals, (ii) certifies counterfactuals through a combinatorial feasibility model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Sohaib Lafifi

In this paper, we address open computational questions regarding the market share ranking problem, recently introduced by Derakhshan et al. (2022). Their modelling framework incorporates the extremely popular Multinomial Logit (MNL) choice…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Danny Segev , Gidi Steinberg

We consider an online matching problem with concave returns. This problem is a significant generalization of the Adwords allocation problem and has vast applications in online advertising. In this problem, a sequence of items arrive…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-06-09 Xiao Alison Chen , Zizhuo Wang