Related papers: Exploitation of Multiple Replenishing Resources wi…
Sequential decision tasks with incomplete information are characterized by the exploration problem; namely the trade-off between further exploration for learning more about the environment and immediate exploitation of the accrued…
Chance constraints are frequently used to limit the probability of constraint violations in real-world optimization problems where the constraints involve stochastic components. We study chance-constrained submodular optimization problems,…
Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…
We study the classic problem in which a Searcher must locate a hidden point, also called the Hider in a network, starting from a root point. The network may be either bounded or unbounded, thus generalizing well-known settings such as…
With the pervasiveness of Stochastic Shortest-Path (SSP) problems in high-risk industries, such as last-mile autonomous delivery and supply chain management, robust planning algorithms are crucial for ensuring successful task completion…
In each step of the $p$-processor cup game on $n$ cups, a filler distributes up to $p$ units of water among the cups, subject only to the constraint that no cup receives more than $1$ unit of water; an emptier then removes up to $1$ unit of…
We study the task of selecting $k$ nodes, in a social network of size $n$, to seed a diffusion with maximum expected spread size, under the independent cascade model with cascade probability $p$. Most of the previous work on this problem…
This article studies the Minimum Spanning Tree Problem under Explorable Uncertainty as well as a related vertex uncertainty version of the problem. We particularly consider special instance types, including cactus graphs, for which we…
Ranking and selection (R&S) aims to select the best alternative with the largest mean performance from a finite set of alternatives. Recently, considerable attention has turned towards the large-scale R&S problem which involves a large…
Information theory has explained the organization of many biological phenomena, from the physiology of sensory receptive fields to the variability of certain DNA sequence ensembles. Some scholars have proposed that information should…
We study countably infinite stochastic 2-player games with reachability objectives. Our results provide a complete picture of the memory requirements of $\varepsilon$-optimal (resp. optimal) strategies. These results depend on the size of…
Taking into account future risk is essential for an autonomously operating robot to find online not only the best but also a safe action to execute. In this paper, we build upon the recently introduced formulation of probabilistic…
We consider the fundamental problem of selecting $k$ out of $n$ random variables in a way that the expected highest or second-highest value is maximized. This question captures several applications where we have uncertainty about the…
We consider the problem of finding an incremental solution to a cardinality-constrained maximization problem that not only captures the solution for a fixed cardinality, but also describes how to gradually grow the solution as the…
We consider a decision network on an undirected graph in which each node corresponds to a decision variable, and each node and edge of the graph is associated with a reward function whose value depends only on the variables of the…
Speculative sampling (SpS) has been successful in accelerating the decoding throughput of auto-regressive large language models by leveraging smaller draft models. SpS strictly enforces the generated distribution to match that of the…
Tackling simulation optimization problems with non-convex objective functions remains a fundamental challenge in operations research. In this paper, we propose a class of random search algorithms, called Regular Tree Search, which…
Constraint Optimization Problems (COP) pose intricate challenges in combinatorial problems usually addressed through Branch and Bound (B\&B) methods, which involve maintaining priority queues and iteratively selecting branches to search for…
We consider caching in cellular networks in which each base station is equipped with a cache that can store a limited number of files. The popularity of the files is known and the goal is to place files in the caches such that the…
We consider single-sink network flow problems. An instance consists of a capacitated graph (directed or undirected), a sink node $t$ and a set of demands that we want to send to the sink. Here demand $i$ is located at a node $s_i$ and…