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Stable distributions provide a flexible framework for modeling heavy-tailed and skewed data, with the stability index $\alpha$ quantifying tail heaviness. We propose a new semiparametric estimator for $\alpha$ that leverages the two-sum…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-19 Cornelis J. Potgieter , Jacques van Appel , Sudharshan Samaratunga

Approval voting is a common method of preference aggregation where voters vote by ``approving'' of a subset of candidates and the winner(s) are those who are approved of by the largest number of voters. In approval voting, the degree to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-07-19 Hari Sarang Nathan

We consider unconstrained optimization problems where only "stochastic" estimates of the objective function are observable as replicates from a Monte Carlo oracle. The Monte Carlo oracle is assumed to provide no direct observations of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-10-21 Sara Shashaani , Fatemeh Hashemi , Raghu Pasupathy

Experiments studying get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts estimate the causal effect of various mobilization efforts on voter turnout. However, there is often substantial noncompliance in these studies. A usual approach is to use an instrumental…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-02 Nicole E. Pashley , Luke Keele , Luke W. Miratrix

Prevailing alignment methods target a fixed set of preferences and therefore risk forcing value lock-in as societal norms evolve over time. We introduce Adaptive Pluralistic Alignment (APA), a modular pipeline for updating pluralistically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Rachel Freedman

Sampling multiple responses improves language model reasoning, but uniform compute allocation is inefficient: easy questions are over-sampled while hard questions remain under-explored. We propose Uncertainty-Aware Budget Allocation (UAB),…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Manh Nguyen , Sunil Gupta , Hung Le

Demographic skews in human preference data propagate systematic unfairness through reward models into aligned LLMs. We introduce Fairness Aware Reward Optimization (Faro), an in-processing framework that trains reward models under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ching Lam Choi , Vighnesh Subramaniam , Phillip Isola , Antonio Torralba , Stefanie Jegelka

Test collections are information-retrieval tools that allow researchers to quickly and easily evaluate ranking algorithms. While test collections have become an integral part of IR research, the process of data creation involves significant…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Rikiya Takehi , Ellen M. Voorhees , Tetsuya Sakai , Ian Soboroff

In many real world elections, agents are not required to rank all candidates. We study three of the most common methods used to modify voting rules to deal with such partial votes. These methods modify scoring rules (like the Borda count),…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-06-02 Nina Narodytska , Toby Walsh

Reinforcement learning has become a cornerstone technique for developing reasoning models in complex tasks, ranging from mathematical problem-solving to imaginary reasoning. The optimization of these models typically relies on policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Qingnan Ren , Shiting Huang , Zhen Fang , Zehui Chen , Lin Chen , Lijun Li , Feng Zhao

Stochastic optimization finds a wide range of applications in operations research and management science. However, existing stochastic optimization techniques usually require the information of random samples (e.g., demands in the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-04-18 Xi Chen , Qihang Lin , Zizhuo Wang

Traditional on-policy Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) frameworks suffer from experience waste and reward homogeneity, which directly hinders learning efficiency on difficult samples during large language models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Xu Wan , Yansheng Wang , Wenqi Huang , Mingyang Sun

Machine learning algorithms in healthcare have the potential to continually learn from real-world data generated during healthcare delivery and adapt to dataset shifts. As such, the FDA is looking to design policies that can autonomously…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-15 Jean Feng

Testing for the significance of a subset of regression coefficients in a linear model, a staple of statistical analysis, goes back at least to the work of Fisher who introduced the analysis of variance (ANOVA). We study this problem under…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-02-24 Ery Arias-Castro , Emmanuel J. Candès , Yaniv Plan

Multi-winner voting rules based on approval ballots have received increased attention in recent years. In particular Satisfaction Approval Voting (SAV) and its variants have been proposed. In this note, we show that the winning set can be…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-01-12 Haris Aziz , Toby Walsh

We give an explicit algorithm and source code for combining alpha streams via bounded regression. In practical applications typically there is insufficient history to compute a sample covariance matrix (SCM) for a large number of alphas. To…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2015-11-05 Zura Kakushadze

Firms increasingly use randomized experiments to decide whether to scale up an intervention and, if so, how to re-optimize related operational choices such as inventory, capacity, or pricing. In many settings, experiments are performed on…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-12 Guoxing He , Dan Yang , Wei Zhang

Tabulation audits for an election provide statistical evidence that a reported contest outcome is "correct" (meaning that the tabulation of votes was properly performed), or else the tabulation audit determines the correct outcome. Stark…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-02-13 Ronald L. Rivest

Sample average approximation (SAA) is a widely popular approach to data-driven decision-making under uncertainty. Under mild assumptions, SAA is both tractable and enjoys strong asymptotic performance guarantees. Similar guarantees,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-11-03 Dimitris Bertsimas , Vishal Gupta , Nathan Kallus

Post-election audits use the discrepancy between machine counts and a hand tally of votes in a random sample of precincts to infer whether error affected the electoral outcome. The maximum relative overstatement of pairwise margins (MRO)…

Applications · Statistics 2008-11-12 Philip B. Stark