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We consider the ANTS problem [Feinerman et al.] in which a group of agents collaboratively search for a target in a two-dimensional plane. Because this problem is inspired by the behavior of biological species, we argue that in addition to…
Given a set $ P $ of $n$ points and a set $ H $ of $n$ half-planes in the plane, we consider the problem of computing a smallest subset of points such that each half-plane contains at least one point of the subset. The previously best…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) have shown remarkable few-shot learning capabilities when provided with properly formatted examples. However, selecting the "best" examples remains an open challenge. We propose a complexity-based prompt…
Let $P_r(n)$ be the set of partitions of n with non negative rth differences. Let $\lambda$ be a partition chosen uniformly at random among the set $P_r(n)$. Let $d(\lambda)$ be a positive rth difference chosen uniformly at random in…
This paper considers the sample-efficiency of preference learning, which models and predicts human choices based on comparative judgments. The minimax optimal estimation error rate $\Theta(d/n)$ in classical estimation theory requires that…
LLMs are useful because they generalize so well. But can you have too much of a good thing? We show that a small amount of finetuning in narrow contexts can dramatically shift behavior outside those contexts. In one experiment, we finetune…
We consider the urn setting with two different objects, ``good'' and ``bad'', and analyze the number of draws without replacement until a good object is picked. Although the expected number of draws for this setting is a standard textbook…
The era of Big Data has spawned unprecedented interests in developing hashing algorithms for efficient storage and fast nearest neighbor search. Most existing work learn hash functions that are numeric quantizations of feature values in…
While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate emerging reasoning capabilities, current inference-time expansion methods incur prohibitive computational costs by exhaustive sampling. Through analyzing decoding trajectories, we observe that…
The most common representation in evolutionary computation are bit strings. This is ideal to model binary decision variables, but less useful for variables taking more values. With very little theoretical work existing on how to use…
As machine learning agents act more autonomously in the world, they will increasingly interact with each other. Unfortunately, in many social dilemmas like the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma, standard game theory predicts that ML agents will…
This work proposes a robot task planning framework for retrieving a target object in a confined workspace among multiple stacked objects that obstruct the target. The robot can use prehensile picking and in-workspace placing actions. The…
This paper studies one-sided hypothesis testing under random sampling without replacement. That is, when $n+1$ binary random variables $X_1,\ldots, X_{n+1}$ are subject to a permutation invariant distribution and $n$ binary random variables…
It is known that any open necklace with beads of $t$ types in which the number of beads of each type is divisible by $k$, can be partitioned by at most $(k-1)t$ cuts into intervals that can be distributed into $k$ collections, each…
In the random-order online set cover problem, the instance with $m$ sets and $n$ elements is chosen in a worst-case fashion, but then the elements arrive in a uniformly random order. Can this random-order model allow us to circumvent the…
In this work we study Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables (IBLTs) with small failure probabilities. IBLTs are highly versatile data structures that have found applications in set reconciliation protocols, error-correcting codes, and even the…
Let a deck of n cards be shuffled by successively exchanging the cards in positions 1, 2, ..., n with cards in randomly chosen positions. We show that for n equal to 18 or greater, the identity permutation is the most likely. We prove a…
The problem of guessing subject to distortion is considered, and the performance of randomized guessing strategies is investigated. A one-shot achievability bound on the guessing moment (i.e., moment of the number of required queries) is…
Recent work on the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) shows that there exist ``\textit{winning tickets}'' in large neural networks. These tickets represent ``sparse'' versions of the full model that can be trained independently to achieve…
A sequence of reversals that takes a signed permutation to the identity is perfect if at no step a common interval is broken. Determining a parsimonious perfect sequence of reversals that sorts a signed permutation is NP-hard. Here we show…