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We study fair allocation of indivisible goods among strategic agents with additive valuations. Motivated by impossibility results for deterministic truthful mechanisms, we focus on randomized mechanisms that are…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Moshe Babaioff , Uriel Feige , Noam Manaker Morag

We study three classical online problems -- $k$-server, $k$-taxi, and chasing size $k$ sets -- through a lens of smoothed analysis. Our setting allows request locations to be adversarial up to small perturbations, interpolating between…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Christian Coester , Jack Umenberger

We study the non-uniform capacitated multi-item lot-sizing (\lotsizing) problem. In this problem, there is a set of demands over a planning horizon of $T$ time periods and all demands must be satisfied on time. We can place an order at the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-10-10 Shi Li

In the prophet inequality problem, a gambler faces a sequence of items arriving online with values drawn independently from known distributions. On seeing an item, the gambler must choose whether to accept its value as her reward and quit…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Archit Bubna , Ashish Chiplunkar

Column-sparse packing problems arise in several contexts in both deterministic and stochastic discrete optimization. We present two unifying ideas, (non-uniform) attenuation and multiple-chance algorithms, to obtain improved approximation…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-08-07 Brian Brubach , Karthik Abinav Sankararaman , Aravind Srinivasan , Pan Xu

In this paper, we study $k$-unit single sample prophet inequalities. A seller has $k$ identical, indivisible items to sell. A sequence of buyers arrive one-by-one, with each buyer's private value for the item, $X_i$, revealed to the seller…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Pranav Nuti , Peter Westbrook

We study the online stochastic bipartite matching problem, in a form motivated by display ad allocation on the Internet. In the online, but adversarial case, the celebrated result of Karp, Vazirani and Vazirani gives an approximation ratio…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2009-05-27 Jon Feldman , Aranyak Mehta , Vahab Mirrokni , S. Muthukrishnan

There are two major models of value uncertainty in the optimal stopping literature: the secretary model, which assumes no prior knowledge, and the prophet inequality model, which assumes full information about value distributions. In…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Tian Bai , Zhiyi Huang , Chui Shan Lee , Dongchen Li

Studying how to fine-tune offline reinforcement learning (RL) pre-trained policy is profoundly significant for enhancing the sample efficiency of RL algorithms. However, directly fine-tuning pre-trained policies often results in sub-optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Ziqi Zhang , Xiao Xiong , Zifeng Zhuang , Jinxin Liu , Donglin Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Arpit Agarwal , Rohan Ghuge , Viswanath Nagarajan , Zhengjia Zhuo

For online resource allocation problems, we propose a new demand arrival model where the sequence of arrivals contains both an adversarial component and a stochastic one. Our model requires no demand forecasting; however, due to the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-10-02 Dawsen Hwang , Patrick Jaillet , Vahideh Manshadi

The fractional knapsack problem is one of the classical problems in combinatorial optimization, which is well understood in the offline setting. However, the corresponding online setting has been handled only briefly in the theoretical…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-01-31 Jeff Giliberti , Andreas Karrenbauer

Bandits with Knapsacks (BwK), the generalization of the Bandits problem under global budget constraints, has received a lot of attention in recent years. Previous work has focused on one of the two extremes: Stochastic BwK where the rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Giannis Fikioris , Éva Tardos

In this paper, we investigate the online allocation problem of maximizing the overall revenue subject to both lower and upper bound constraints. Compared to the extensively studied online problems with only resource upper bounds, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Qixin Zhang , Wenbing Ye , Zaiyi Chen , Haoyuan Hu , Enhong Chen , Yang Yu

We consider generalizations of the classical secretary problem, also known as the problem of optimal choice, to posets where the only information we have is the size of the poset and the number of maximal elements. We show that, given this…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2012-06-29 Bryn Garrod , Robert Morris

Chance constraints are frequently used to limit the probability of constraint violations in real-world optimization problems where the constraints involve stochastic components. We study chance-constrained submodular optimization problems,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-27 Xiankun Yan , Anh Viet Do , Feng Shi , Xiaoyu Qin , Frank Neumann

We study \emph{parallel} online algorithms: For some fixed integer $k$, a collective of $k$ parallel processes that perform online decisions on the same sequence of events forms a $k$-\emph{copy algorithm}. For any given time and input…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Sándor P. Fekete , Jonas Grosse-Holz , Phillip Keldenich , Arne Schmidt

We give nearly-tight upper and lower bounds for the improving multi-armed bandits problem. An instance of this problem has $k$ arms, each of whose reward function is a concave and increasing function of the number of times that arm has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Avrim Blum , Kavya Ravichandran

The Probabilistic Serial (PS) mechanism -- also known as the simultaneous eating algorithm -- is a canonical solution for the random assignment problem under ordinal preferences. It guarantees envy-freeness and ordinal efficiency in the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Jugal Garg , Yixin Tao , László A. Végh

We study two canonical online optimization problems under capacity/budget constraints: the fractional one-way trading problem (OTP) and the integral online knapsack problem (OKP) under an infinitesimal assumption. Under the competitive…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Ying Cao , Bo Sun , Danny H. K. Tsang