Related papers: Optimal Algorithms for Multiwinner Elections and t…
In the Shortest Common Superstring problem (SCS), one needs to find the shortest superstring for a set of strings. While SCS is NP-hard and MAX-SNP-hard, the Greedy Algorithm "choose two strings with the largest overlap; merge them; repeat"…
Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…
Clustering is an unsupervised learning task that aims to partition data into a set of clusters. In many applications, these clusters correspond to real-world constructs (e.g. electoral districts) whose benefit can only be attained by groups…
The important Kemeny problem, which consists of computing median consensus rankings of an election with respect to the Kemeny voting rule, admits important applications in biology and computational social choice and was generalized recently…
Given a set of $n$ vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$, the goal of the \emph{determinant maximization} problem is to pick $k$ vectors with the maximum volume. Determinant maximization is the MAP-inference task for determinantal point processes (DPP)…
We analyze the performance of the Borda counting algorithm in a non-parametric model. The algorithm needs to utilize probabilistic rankings of the items within $m$-sized subsets to accurately determine which items are the overall top-$k$…
The problem of selecting a small-size representative summary of a large dataset is a cornerstone of machine learning, optimization and data science. Motivated by applications to recommendation systems and other scenarios with query-limited…
We consider a class of multi-agent optimal coverage problems in which the goal is to determine the optimal placement of a group of agents in a given mission space so that they maximize a coverage objective that represents a blend of…
The maximization of submodular functions is an NP-Hard problem for certain subclasses of functions, for which a simple greedy algorithm has been shown to guarantee a solution whose quality is within 1/2 of the optimal. When this algorithm…
We study the problem of selecting a subset of k random variables from a large set, in order to obtain the best linear prediction of another variable of interest. This problem can be viewed in the context of both feature selection and sparse…
The Possible-Winner problem asks, given an election where the voters' preferences over the set of candidates is partially specified, whether a distinguished candidate can become a winner. In this work, we consider the computational…
Designing efficient algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is fundamentally challenging because the size of the joint state and action spaces grows exponentially in the number of agents. These difficulties are exacerbated…
We propose a theoretical framework to capture incremental solutions to cardinality constrained maximization problems. The defining characteristic of our framework is that the cardinality/support of the solution is bounded by a value…
We present a polynomial-time algorithm for computing an optimal committee of size $k$ under any given Thiele voting rule for elections on the Voter Interval domain (i.e., when voters can be ordered so that each candidate is approved by a…
It is known that greedy methods perform well for maximizing monotone submodular functions. At the same time, such methods perform poorly in the face of non-monotonicity. In this paper, we show - arguably, surprisingly - that invoking the…
Multiwinner voting rules can be used to select a fixed-size committee from a larger set of candidates. We consider approval-based committee rules, which allow voters to approve or disapprove candidates. In this setting, several voting rules…
We view voting rules as classifiers that assign a winner (a class) to a profile of voters' preferences (an instance). We propose to apply techniques from formal explainability, most notably abductive and contrastive explanations, to…
We study the problem of selecting a subset of vectors from a large set, to obtain the best signal representation over a family of functions. Although greedy methods have been widely used for tackling this problem and many of those have been…
Consider elections where the set of candidates is partitioned into parties, and each party must nominate exactly one candidate. The Possible President problem asks whether some candidate of a given party can become the winner of the…
In the Online Machine Covering problem jobs, defined by their sizes, arrive one by one and have to be assigned to $m$ parallel and identical machines, with the goal of maximizing the load of the least-loaded machine. In this work, we study…