Related papers: Exploitation of Multiple Replenishing Resources wi…
Random walks are the simplest way to explore or search a graph, and have revealed a very useful tool to investigate and characterize the structural properties of complex networks from the real world, e.g. they have been used to identify the…
A sequence of recent studies show that even in the simple setting of a single seller and a single buyer with additive, independent valuations over $m$ items, the revenue-maximizing mechanism is prohibitively complex. This problem has been…
Metagenomics has revealed hundreds of bacterial species in almost all microbiota. In a few well-studied cases, bacterial communities have been observed to coordinate their metabolic fluxes. In principle, bacteria can divide tasks to reap…
UCT, a state-of-the art algorithm for Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) in games and Markov decision processes, is based on UCB, a sampling policy for the Multi-armed Bandit problem (MAB) that minimizes the cumulative regret. However, search…
In many environmental monitoring scenarios, the sampling robot needs to simultaneously explore the environment and exploit features of interest with limited time. We present an anytime multi-objective informative planning method called…
This thesis investigates the use of problem-specific knowledge to enhance a genetic algorithm approach to multiple-choice optimisation problems.It shows that such information can significantly enhance performance, but that the choice of…
Clustering-based nearest neighbor search is an effective method in which points are partitioned into geometric shards to form an index, with only a few shards searched during query processing to find a set of top-$k$ vectors. Even though…
This study presents a rigorous mathematical approach to the optimization of round and betting policies in Blackjack, using Markov Decision Processes (MDP) and Expected Utility Theory. The analysis considers a direct confrontation between a…
While most methods for solving mixed-integer optimization problems compute a single optimal solution, a diverse set of near-optimal solutions can often lead to improved outcomes. We present a new method for finding a set of diverse…
Many information systems use tags and keywords to describe and annotate content. These allow for efficient organization and categorization of items, as well as facilitate relevant search queries. As such, the selected set of tags for an…
Motivated by emerging resource allocation and data placement problems such as web caches and peer-to-peer systems, we consider and study a class of resource allocation problems over a network of agents (nodes). In this model, nodes can…
This paper introduces a novel backup strategy for Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) designed for highly stochastic and partially observable Markov decision processes. We adopt a probabilistic approach, modeling both value and action-value…
We investigate a graph probing problem in which an agent has only an incomplete view $G' \subsetneq G$ of the network and wishes to explore the network with least effort. In each step, the agent selects a node $u$ in $G'$ to probe. After…
This paper develops a highly simplified model with which to analyze the phenomenon of sleep. Motivated by Crick's suggestion that sleep is the brain's way of ``taking out the trash,'' a suggestion that is supported by emerging evidence, we…
Motivated by the applications of rental services in e-commerce, we consider revenue maximization in online assortment of reusable resources for a stream of arriving consumers with different types. We design competitive online algorithms…
Whether a population of decision-making individuals will reach a state of satisfactory decisions is a fundamental problem in studying collective behaviors. In the framework of evolutionary game theory and by means of potential functions,…
We consider a two-stage stochastic decision problem where the decision-maker has the opportunity to obtain information about the distribution of the random variables $\xi$ that appear in the problem through a set of discrete actions that we…
Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a widely-used strategy for online planning that combines Monte-Carlo sampling with forward tree search. Its success relies on the Upper Confidence bound for Trees (UCT) algorithm, an extension of the UCB…
We study the dominating set problem in an online setting. An algorithm is required to guarantee competitiveness against an adversary that reveals the input graph one node at a time. When a node is revealed, the algorithm learns about the…
Stochastic matching is the stochastic version of the well-known matching problem, which consists in maximizing the rewards of a matching under a set of probability distributions associated with the nodes and edges. In most stochastic…