Related papers: When Can Liquid Democracy Unveil the Truth?
We study the problem of minimizing a sum of convex objective functions where the components of the objective are available at different nodes of a network and nodes are allowed to only communicate with their neighbors. The use of…
We consider the fundamental mechanism design problem of approximate social welfare maximization under general cardinal preferences on a finite number of alternatives and without money. The well-known range voting scheme can be thought of as…
The sustainable utilization of hydro energy relies on accurate estimates of the opportunity cost of the water. This value is calculated through long-term hydrothermal dispatch problems (LTHDP), and the recent literature has raised awareness…
Model checking undiscounted reachability and expected-reward properties on Markov decision processes (MDPs) is key for the verification of systems that act under uncertainty. Popular algorithms are policy iteration and variants of value…
This paper considers elections in which voters choose one candidate each, independently according to known probability distributions. A candidate receiving a strict majority (absolute or relative, depending on the version) wins. After the…
This work considers the sample complexity of obtaining an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in an average reward Markov Decision Process (AMDP), given access to a generative model (simulator). When the ground-truth MDP is weakly communicating,…
Motivated by civic problems such as participatory budgeting and multiwinner elections, we consider the problem of public good allocation: Given a set of indivisible projects (or candidates) of different sizes, and voters with different…
In this work, we study contextual strongly convex simulation optimization and adopt an "optimize then predict" (OTP) approach for real-time decision making. In the offline stage, simulation optimization is conducted across a set of…
The budget is the key means for effecting policy in democracies, yet its preparation is typically an excluding, opaque, and arcane process. We aim to rectify this by providing for the democratic creation of complete budgets --- for…
We introduce and study the \emph{Lattice Distortion Problem} (LDP). LDP asks how "similar" two lattices are. I.e., what is the minimal distortion of a linear bijection between the two lattices? LDP generalizes the Lattice Isomorphism…
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a natural and general model in reinforcement learning that take into account the agent's uncertainty about its current state. In the literature on POMDPs, it is customary to assume…
Data Collaboration (DC) enables multiple parties to jointly train a model by sharing only linear projections of their private datasets. The core challenge in DC is to align the bases of these projections without revealing each party's…
We consider two core algorithmic problems for probabilistic verification: the maximal end-component decomposition and the almost-sure reachability set computation for Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs with treewidth $k$, we present…
Manipulation, bribery, and control are well-studied ways of changing the outcome of an election. Many voting rules are, in the general case, computationally resistant to some of these manipulative actions. However when restricted to…
We introduce and study isomorphic distances between ordinal elections (with the same numbers of candidates and voters). The main feature of these distances is that they are invariant to renaming the candidates and voters, and two elections…
We study the efficiency guarantees in the simple auction environment where the auctioneer has one unit of divisible good to be distributed among a number of budget constrained agents. With budget constraints, the social welfare cannot be…
In the classical Node-Disjoint Paths (NDP) problem, we are given an $n$-vertex graph $G=(V,E)$, and a collection $M=\{(s_1,t_1),\ldots,(s_k,t_k)\}$ of pairs of its vertices, called source-destination, or demand pairs. The goal is to route…
We study the problem of policy synthesis for uncertain partially observable Markov decision processes (uPOMDPs). The transition probability function of uPOMDPs is only known to belong to a so-called uncertainty set, for instance in the form…
Distributed aggregative optimization methods are gaining increased traction due to their ability to address cooperative control and optimization problems, where the objective function of each agent depends not only on its own decision…
For many computational problems involving randomness, intricate geometric features of the solution space have been used to rigorously rule out powerful classes of algorithms. This is often accomplished through the lens of the multi Overlap…