Related papers: Online Search with Maximum Clearance
Consider a hiring process with candidates coming from different universities. It is easy to order candidates with the same background, yet it can be challenging to compare them otherwise. The latter case requires additional costly…
A group of mobile agents is given a task to explore an edge-weighted graph $G$, i.e., every vertex of $G$ has to be visited by at least one agent. There is no centralized unit to coordinate their actions, but they can freely communicate…
We study an online mixed discrete and continuous optimization problem where a decision maker interacts with an unknown environment for a number of $T$ rounds. At each round, the decision maker needs to first jointly choose a discrete and a…
The gold standard for designing a search plan is to select a target distribution and then find the uniformly optimal search plan based on it. This approach has been successfully applied in several high-profile civil and military search…
Many natural processes rely on optimizing the success ratio of a search process. We use an experimental setup consisting of a simple online game in which players have to find a target hidden on a board, to investigate the how the rounds are…
Bayesian optimization offers a flexible framework to optimize an objective function that is expensive to be evaluated. A Bayesian optimizer iteratively queries the function values on its carefully selected points. Subsequently, it makes a…
We initiate the study of online contracts, which integrate the game-theoretic considerations of economic contract theory, with the algorithmic and informational challenges of online algorithm design. Our starting point is the classic online…
This work addresses the problem of exploration in an unknown environment. For linear dynamical systems, we use an experimental design framework and introduce an online greedy policy where the control maximizes the information of the next…
We carry out a comparative study on the problem for a walker searching on several typical complex networks. The search efficiency is evaluated for various strategies. Having no knowledge of the global properties of the underlying networks…
We consider a search problem in which one or more targets must be rescued by a search party, or Searcher. The targets may be survivors of some natural disaster, or prisoners held by an adversary. The targets are hidden among a finite set of…
Several well-studied online resource allocation problems can be formulated in terms of infinite, increasing sequences of positive values, in which each element is associated with a corresponding allocation value. Examples include problems…
Combinatorial multi-armed bandits provide a fundamental online decision-making environment where a decision-maker interacts with an environment across $T$ time steps, each time selecting an action and learning the cost of that action. The…
This paper develops learning-augmented algorithms for energy trading in volatile electricity markets. The basic problem is to sell (or buy) $k$ units of energy for the highest revenue (lowest cost) over uncertain time-varying prices, which…
We consider the problem of multiple agents or robots searching for a target in the plane. This is motivated by Search and Rescue operations (SAR) in the high seas which in the past were often performed with several vessels, and more…
Online advertising has motivated interest in online selection problems. Displaying ads to the right users benefits both the platform (e.g., via pay-per-click) and the advertisers (by increasing their reach). In practice, not all users click…
Previous work on the competitive retrieval setting focused on a single-query setting: document authors manipulate their documents so as to improve their future ranking for a given query. We study a competitive setting where authors opt to…
Internet advertising is a sophisticated game in which the many advertisers "play" to optimize their return on investment. There are many "targets" for the advertisements, and each "target" has a collection of games with a potentially…
We consider a discrete-time dynamic search game in which a number of players compete to find an invisible object that is moving according to a time-varying Markov chain. We examine the subgame perfect equilibria of these games. The main…
Consider the following classical search problem: given a target point $p\in \Re$, starting at the origin, find $p$ with minimum cost, where cost is defined as the distance travelled. Let $D$ be the distance of $p$ from the origin. When no…
Which ads should we display in sponsored search in order to maximize our revenue? How should we dynamically rank information sources to maximize the value of the ranking? These applications exhibit strong diminishing returns: Redundancy…