Related papers: With or without replacement? Sampling uncertainty …
The problem of scheduling tasks on $p$ processors so that no task ever gets too far behind is often described as a game with cups and water. In the $p$-processor cup game on $n$ cups, there are two players, a filler and an emptier, that…
Motion planning under differential constraints is a classic problem in robotics. To date, the state of the art is represented by sampling-based techniques, with the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree algorithm as a leading example. Yet, the…
Evaluating performance across optimization algorithms on many problems presents a complex challenge due to the diversity of numerical scales involved. Traditional data processing methods, such as hypothesis testing and Bayesian inference,…
Concentration inequalities quantify the deviation of a random variable from a fixed value. In spite of numerous applications, such as opinion surveys or ecological counting procedures, few concentration results are known for the setting of…
We use death processes and embeddings into continuous time in order to analyze several urn models with a diminishing content. In particular we discuss generalizations of the pill's problem, originally introduced by Knuth and McCarthy, and…
In this paper we investigate the problem of sorting a set of $n$ coins, each with distinct but unknown weights, using an unusual scale. The classical version of this problem, which has been well-studied, gives the user a binary scale,…
Standard Markovian optimal stopping problems are consistent in the sense that the first entrance time into the stopping set is optimal for each initial state of the process. Clearly, the usual concept of optimality cannot in a…
A classical P\'olya urn scheme is a Markov process whose evolution is encoded by a replacement matrix $(R_{i,j})_{1\leq i,j\leq d}$. At every discrete time-step, we draw a ball uniformly at random, denote its colour $c$, and replace it in…
Mechanism design is addressed in the context of fair allocations of indivisible goods with monetary compensation. Motivated by a real-world social choice problem, mechanisms with verification are considered in a setting where (i) agents'…
The literature on "mechanism design from samples," which has flourished in recent years at the interface of economics and computer science, offers a bridge between the classic computer-science approach of worst-case analysis (corresponding…
The spherical cap discrepancy is a widely used measure for how uniformly a sample of points on the sphere is distributed. Being hard to compute, this discrepancy measure is typically replaced by some lower or upper estimates when designing…
The problems of determining the optimal power allocation, within maximum power bounds, to (i) maximize the minimum Shannon capacity, and (ii) minimize the weighted latency are considered. In the first case, the global optima can be achieved…
We introduce the problem of \emph{entropy equivalence testing} for probability distributions, a relaxation of the well-studied closeness testing problem, where the distribution testing algorithm is now only required to distinguish, given…
This paper considers an information bottleneck problem with the objective of obtaining a most informative representation of a hidden feature subject to a R\'enyi entropy complexity constraint. The optimal bottleneck trade-off between…
We tackle the problem of Selective Classification where the objective is to achieve the best performance on a predetermined ratio (coverage) of the dataset. Recent state-of-the-art selective methods come with architectural changes either…
Equilibrium sampling of biomolecules remains an unmet challenge after more than 30 years of atomistic simulation. Efforts to enhance sampling capability, which are reviewed here, range from the development of new algorithms to…
We are interested in solving convex optimization problems with large numbers of constraints. Randomized algorithms, such as random constraint sampling, have been very successful in giving nearly optimal solutions to such problems. In this…
We consider a non-stationary formulation of the stochastic multi-armed bandit where the rewards are no longer assumed to be identically distributed. For the best-arm identification task, we introduce a version of Successive Elimination…
This paper concerns optimal stopping problems driven by the running maximum of a spectrally negative L\'{e}vy process $X$. More precisely, we are interested in modifications of the Shepp-Shiryaev optimal stopping problem [Avram, Kyprianou…
When facing many options, we narrow down our focus to very few of them. Although behaviors like this can be a sign of heuristics, they can actually be optimal under limited cognitive resources. Here we study the problem of how to optimally…