Related papers: $\alpha^{\alpha}$-Rank: Practically Scaling $\alph…
We introduce AlphaRank, an artificial intelligence approach to address the fixed-budget ranking and selection (R&S) problems. We formulate the sequential sampling decision as a Markov decision process and propose a Monte Carlo…
We introduce $\alpha$-Rank, a principled evolutionary dynamics methodology for the evaluation and ranking of agents in large-scale multi-agent interactions, grounded in a novel dynamical game-theoretic solution concept called Markov-Conley…
The question of knowing whether the policy Iteration algorithm (PI) for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) has exponential or (strongly) polynomial complexity has attracted much attention in the last 50 years. Recently, Fearnley…
We study the problem of minimizing the resource capacity of autonomous agents cooperating to achieve a shared task. More specifically, we consider high-level planning for a team of homogeneous agents that operate under resource constraints…
Game theory has been increasingly applied in settings where the game is not known outright, but has to be estimated by sampling. For example, meta-games that arise in multi-agent evaluation can only be accessed by running a succession of…
Query plans are compared according to multiple cost metrics in multi-objective query optimization. The goal is to find the set of Pareto plans realizing optimal cost tradeoffs for a given query. So far, only algorithms with exponential…
In this work we consider the problem of maximizing the PageRank of a given target node in a graph by adding $k$ new links. We consider the case that the new links must point to the given target node (backlinks). Previous work shows that…
The importance of a node in a directed graph can be measured by its PageRank. The PageRank of a node is used in a number of application contexts - including ranking websites - and can be interpreted as the average portion of time spent at…
Estimating a policy that maps states to actions is a central problem in reinforcement learning. Traditionally, policies are inferred from the so called value functions (VFs), but exact VF computation suffers from the curse of…
We address the problem of finding an optimal policy in a Markov decision process under a restricted policy class defined by the convex hull of a set of base policies. This problem is of great interest in applications in which a number of…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
Replicability is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), as RL algorithms are empirically observed to be unstable and sensitive to variations in training conditions. To formally address this issue, we study \emph{list…
We consider the problem of planning with participation constraints introduced in [Zhang et al., 2022]. In this problem, a principal chooses actions in a Markov decision process, resulting in separate utilities for the principal and the…
In this note, we investigate how well we can reconstruct the best rank-$r$ approximation of a large matrix from a small number of its entries. We show that even if a data matrix is of full rank and cannot be approximated well by a low-rank…
Allocating scarce resources among agents to maximize global utility is, in general, computationally challenging. We focus on problems where resources enable agents to execute actions in stochastic environments, modeled as Markov decision…
Here, we give an algorithm for deciding if the nonnegative rank of a matrix $M$ of dimension $m \times n$ is at most $r$ which runs in time $(nm)^{O(r^2)}$. This is the first exact algorithm that runs in time singly-exponential in $r$. This…
We propose RoBiRank, a ranking algorithm that is motivated by observing a close connection between evaluation metrics for learning to rank and loss functions for robust classification. The algorithm shows a very competitive performance on…
The main contribution of this paper resides in providing novel algorithmic advances and analytical insights for the sequential hiring problem, a recently introduced dynamic optimization model where a firm adaptively fills a limited number…
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is NP-hard to solve optimally, even on graphs, suggesting no polynomial-time algorithms can compute exact optimal solutions for them. This raises a natural question: How optimal can polynomial-time algorithms…
One of the strongest techniques available for showing lower bounds on quantum communication complexity is the logarithm of the approximation rank of the communication matrix--the minimum rank of a matrix which is entrywise close to the…