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Prediction sets can wrap around any ML model to cover unknown test outcomes with a guaranteed probability. Yet, it remains unclear how to use them optimally for downstream decision-making. Here, we propose a decision-theoretic framework…
Our goal is to build robust optimization problems for making decisions based on complex data from the past. In robust optimization (RO) generally, the goal is to create a policy for decision-making that is robust to our uncertainty about…
It is becoming increasingly apparent that probabilistic approaches can overcome conservatism and computational complexity of the classical worst-case deterministic framework and may lead to designs that are actually safer. In this paper we…
We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable Markov decision processes. In particular, we aim to learn an optimal policy from a dataset collected by a behavior policy which possibly depends on the latent state. Such…
There is growing importance to detecting faults and implementing the best methods in industrial and real-world systems. We are searching for the most trustworthy and practical data-based fault detection methods proposed by artificial…
While maximizing expected return is the goal in most reinforcement learning approaches, risk-sensitive objectives such as conditional value at risk (CVaR) are more suitable for many high-stakes applications. However, relatively little is…
Existing approaches of prescriptive analytics -- where inputs of an optimization model can be predicted by leveraging covariates in a machine learning model -- often attempt to optimize the mean value of an uncertain objective. However,…
We study offline dynamic pricing when historical data provide incomplete coverage of the price space such that some candidate prices, including the optimal one, may be entirely unobserved. This setting is common in practice and is…
An important problem in sequential decision-making under uncertainty is to use limited data to compute a safe policy, i.e., a policy that is guaranteed to perform at least as well as a given baseline strategy. In this paper, we develop and…
Optimization is offered as an objective approach to resolving complex, real-world decisions involving uncertainty and conflicting interests. It drives business strategies as well as public policies and, increasingly, lies at the heart of…
Algorithms often have tunable parameters that impact performance metrics such as runtime and solution quality. For many algorithms used in practice, no parameter settings admit meaningful worst-case bounds, so the parameters are made…
The classical approach to system identification is based on stochastic assumptions about the measurement error, and provides estimates that have random nature. Worst-case identification, on the other hand, only assumes the knowledge of…
Inference-time computation offers a powerful axis for scaling the performance of language models. However, naively increasing computation in techniques like Best-of-N sampling can lead to performance degradation due to reward hacking.…
In reinforcement learning, robust policies for high-stakes decision-making problems with limited data are usually computed by optimizing the percentile criterion, which minimizes the probability of a catastrophic failure. Unfortunately,…
Prediction models are often employed in estimating parameters of optimization models. Despite the fact that in an end-to-end view, the real goal is to achieve good optimization performance, the prediction performance is measured on its own.…
Policy optimization algorithms are crucial in many fields but challenging to grasp and implement, often due to complex calculations related to Markov decision processes and varying use of discount and average reward setups. This paper…
Evaluating and optimizing policies in the presence of unobserved confounders is a problem of growing interest in offline reinforcement learning. Using conventional methods for offline RL in the presence of confounding can not only lead to…
Machine learning algorithms typically rely on optimization subroutines and are well-known to provide very effective outcomes for many types of problems. Here, we flip the reliance and ask the reverse question: can machine learning…
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 introduce algorithms that use predictions from machine learning applied to the input to circumvent worst-case analysis. We aim for algorithms that have near optimal performance when these predictions are good, but recover the…