Related papers: Approximating Pandora's Box with Correlations
We study the problem of computing maximin share guarantees, a recently introduced fairness notion. Given a set of $n$ agents and a set of goods, the maximin share of a single agent is the best that she can guarantee to herself, if she would…
In this paper, we investigate the butterfly factorization problem, i.e., the problem of approximating a matrix by a product of sparse and structured factors. We propose a new formal mathematical description of such factors, that encompasses…
We give an algorithm for properly learning Poisson binomial distributions. A Poisson binomial distribution (PBD) of order $n$ is the discrete probability distribution of the sum of $n$ mutually independent Bernoulli random variables. Given…
Optimal control problems are inherently hard to solve as the optimization must be performed simultaneously with updating the underlying system. Starting from an initial guess, Howard's policy improvement algorithm separates the step of…
In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm for the minimum dominating set problem. For some especial networks, we prove theoretically that the achieved answer by our proposed algorithm is a constant approximation factor of the exact…
Computing and storing probabilities is a hard problem as soon as one has to deal with complex distributions over multiple random variables. The problem of efficient representation of probability distributions is central in term of…
We study a continuous-time, infinite-horizon dynamic bipartite matching problem. Suppliers arrive according to a Poisson process; while waiting, they may abandon the queue at a uniform rate. Customers on the other hand must be matched upon…
MAX CLIQUE problem (MCP) is an NPO problem, which asks to find the largest complete sub-graph in a graph $G, G = (V, E)$ (directed or undirected). MCP is well known to be $NP-Hard$ to approximate in polynomial time with an approximation…
Sequential multi-class diagnosis, also known as multi-hypothesis testing, is a classical sequential decision problem with broad applications. However, the optimal solution remains, in general, unknown as the dynamic program suffers from the…
We initiate a systematic study of utilizing predictions to improve over approximation guarantees of classic algorithms, without increasing the running time. We propose a systematic method for a wide class of optimization problems that ask…
In the theory of Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), existence of optimal policies have in general been established via converting the original partially observed stochastic control problem to a fully observed one on the…
In the weighted flow-time problem on a single machine, we are given a set of n jobs, where each job has a processing requirement p_j, release date r_j and weight w_j. The goal is to find a preemptive schedule which minimizes the sum of…
We study a fundamental problem in optimization under uncertainty. There are $n$ boxes; each box $i$ contains a hidden reward $x_i$. Rewards are drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution $\mathcal{D}$. For each box $i$, we see $y_i$, an…
In the Connected Budgeted maximum Coverage problem (CBC), we are given a collection of subsets $\mathcal{S}$, defined over a ground set $X$, and an undirected graph $G=(V,E)$, where each node is associated with a set of $\mathcal{S}$. Each…
We consider a class of optimization problems over stochastic variables where the algorithm can learn information about the value of any variable through a series of costly steps; we model this information acquisition process as a Markov…
We consider the problem of probably approximately correct (PAC) ranking $n$ items by adaptively eliciting subset-wise preference feedback. At each round, the learner chooses a subset of $k$ items and observes stochastic feedback indicating…
Regularized MDPs serve as a smooth version of original MDPs. However, biased optimal policy always exists for regularized MDPs. Instead of making the coefficient{\lambda}of regularized term sufficiently small, we propose an adaptive…
In the recent paper \cite{BDT10} we introduced a new problem that we call Bin Packing/Covering with Delivery, or BP/CD for short. Mainly we mean under this expression that we look for not only a good, but a "good and fast" packing or…
We study several stochastic combinatorial problems, including the expected utility maximization problem, the stochastic knapsack problem and the stochastic bin packing problem. A common technical challenge in these problems is to optimize…
We consider online variations of the Pandora's box problem (Weitzman. 1979), a standard model for understanding issues related to the cost of acquiring information for decision-making. Our problem generalizes both the classic Pandora's box…