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The game of best choice, also known as the secretary problem, is a model for sequential decision making with many variations in the literature. Notably, the classical setup assumes that the sequence of candidate rankings is uniformly…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-03-13 Madeline Crews , Brant Jones , Kaitlyn Myers , Laura Taalman , Michael Urbanski , Breeann Wilson

Motivated by applications where impatience is pervasive and evaluation times are uncertain, we study a selection model where options may expire at an unknown point in time and evaluation times are stochastic. Initially, the decision-maker…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-05 Yihua Xu , Rohan Ghuge , Sebastian Perez-Salazar

Optimization problems with the objective function in the form of weighted sum and linear equality constraints are considered. Given that the number of local cost functions can be large as well as the number of constraints, a stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-26 Nataša Krejić , Nataša Krklec Jerinkić , Sanja Rapajić , Luka Rutešić

The Matroid Secretary Problem (MSP) is one of the most prominent settings for online resource allocation and optimal stopping. A decision-maker is presented with a ground set of elements $E$ revealed sequentially and in random order. Upon…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Kristóf Bérczi , Vasilis Livanos , José Soto , Victor Verdugo

Prophet inequalities are a useful tool for designing online allocation procedures and comparing their performance to the optimal offline allocation. In the basic setting of $k$-unit prophet inequalities, the well-known procedure of Alaei…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Jiashuo Jiang , Will Ma , Jiawei Zhang

Many real-world problems, such as those with fairness constraints, involve complex expectation constraints and large datasets, necessitating the design of efficient stochastic methods to solve them. Most existing research focuses on cases…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-11 Wei Liu , Yangyang Xu

Suppose that $n$ items arrive online in random order and the goal is to select $k$ of them such that the expected sum of the selected items is maximized. The decision for any item is irrevocable and must be made on arrival without knowing…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Susanne Albers , Leon Ladewig

We study various generalizations of the secretary problem with submodular objective functions. Generally, a set of requests is revealed step-by-step to an algorithm in random order. For each request, one option has to be selected so as to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-08-01 Thomas Kesselheim , Andreas Tönnis

Motivated by multi-user optimization problems and non-cooperative Nash games in stochastic regimes, we consider stochastic variational inequality (SVI) problems on matrix spaces where the variables are positive semidefinite matrices and the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-09-26 Nahidsadat Majlesinasab , Farzad Yousefian , Mohammad Javad Feizollahi

In this work, we conduct a systematic study of stochastic saddle point problems (SSP) and stochastic variational inequalities (SVI) under the constraint of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy (DP) in both Euclidean and non-Euclidean…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Raef Bassily , Cristóbal Guzmán , Michael Menart

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Ziyad Benomar , Evgenii Chzhen , Nicolas Schreuder , Vianney Perchet

One-shot channel simulation is a fundamental data compression problem concerned with encoding a single sample from a target distribution $Q$ using a coding distribution $P$ using as few bits as possible on average. Algorithms that solve…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Gergely Flamich

With applications to many disciplines, the traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a classical computer science optimization problem with applications to industrial engineering, theoretical computer science, bioinformatics, and several other…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-05-26 Yihui He , Ming Xiang

We introduce Selective Greedy Equivalence Search (SGES), a restricted version of Greedy Equivalence Search (GES). SGES retains the asymptotic correctness of GES but, unlike GES, has polynomial performance guarantees. In particular, we show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-06-09 David Maxwell Chickering , Christopher Meek

The Sliding Window Secretary Problem allows a window of choices to the Classical Secretary Problem, in which there is the option to choose the previous $K$ choices immediately prior to the current choice. We consider a case of this…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-09-01 Shan-Yuan Ho , Abijith Krishnan

We study the online fair division problem, where indivisible goods arrive sequentially and must be allocated immediately and irrevocably. Prior work establishes strong impossibility results for approximating classic notions such as…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Davin Choo , Winston Fu , Derek Khu , Tzeh Yuan Neoh , Tze-Yang Poon , Nicholas Teh

We consider prophet inequalities for XOS and MPH-$k$ combinatorial auctions and give a simplified proof for the existence of static and anonymous item prices which recover the state-of-the-art competitive ratios. Our proofs make use of a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Alexander Braun , Thomas Kesselheim

We consider constrained optimization problems with a nonsmooth objective function in the form of mathematical expectation. The Sample Average Approximation (SAA) is used to estimate the objective function and variable sample size strategy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-09 Natasa Krejic , Natasa Krklec Jerinkic , Tijana Ostojic

Large language models are increasingly trained via reinforcement learning for personalized recommendation tasks, but standard methods like GRPO rely on sparse, sequence-level rewards. These obscure which tokens actually contribute to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Abhijnan Nath , Alireza Bagheri Garakani , Tianchen Zhou , Fan Yang , Yan Gao , Nikhil Krishnaswamy

We investigate the problem of designing randomized obviously strategy-proof (OSP) mechanisms in several canonical auction settings. Obvious strategy-proofness, introduced by Li [American Economic Review, 2017], strengthens the well-known…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Shiri Ron , Daniel Schoepflin