English
Related papers

Related papers: Online Learning for Min Sum Set Cover and Pandora'…

200 papers

Bin packing is a classic optimization problem with a wide range of applications, from load balancing to supply chain management. In this work, we study the online variant of the problem, in which a sequence of items of various sizes must be…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Spyros Angelopoulos , Shahin Kamali , Kimia Shadkami

We propose stochastic rank-$1$ bandits, a class of online learning problems where at each step a learning agent chooses a pair of row and column arms, and receives the product of their values as a reward. The main challenge of the problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-09 Sumeet Katariya , Branislav Kveton , Csaba Szepesvari , Claire Vernade , Zheng Wen

This paper revisits the classic Pandora's box problem, studying a decision-maker (DM) who seeks to minimize her maximal ex-post regret. The DM decides how many options to explore and in what order, before choosing one or taking an outside…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-25 Sarah Auster , Yeon-Koo Che

Multi-dimensional online decision making plays a crucial role in many real applications such as online recommendation and digital marketing. In these problems, a decision at each time is a combination of choices from different types of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-14 Jie Zhou , Botao Hao , Zheng Wen , Jingfei Zhang , Will Wei Sun

Modern stochastic optimization methods often rely on uniform sampling which is agnostic to the underlying characteristics of the data. This might degrade the convergence by yielding estimates that suffer from a high variance. A possible…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-07 Zalán Borsos , Andreas Krause , Kfir Y. Levy

In the random-order online set cover problem, the instance with $m$ sets and $n$ elements is chosen in a worst-case fashion, but then the elements arrive in a uniformly random order. Can this random-order model allow us to circumvent the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Anupam Gupta , Marco Molinaro , Matteo Russo

It has been found that stochastic algorithms often find good solutions much more rapidly than inherently-batch approaches. Indeed, a very useful rule of thumb is that often, when solving a machine learning problem, an iterative technique…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-08-19 Andrew Cotter

We introduce the batched set cover problem, which is a generalization of the online set cover problem. In this problem, the elements of the ground set that need to be covered arrive in batches. Our main technical contribution is a tight…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-11-28 Juan C. Martínez Mori , Samitha Samaranayake

In this paper, we study the Markovian Pandora's Box Problem, where decisions are governed by both order constraints and Markovianly correlated rewards, structured within a shared directed acyclic graph. To the best of our knowledge,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Yuanyuan Yang , Ruimin Zhang , Jamie Morgenstern , Haifeng Xu

We consider a large family of problems in which an ordering (or, more precisely, a chain of subsets) of a finite set must be chosen to minimize some weighted sum of costs. This family includes variations of Min Sum Set Cover (MSSC), several…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-06-28 Felix Happach , Lisa Hellerstein , Thomas Lidbetter

We consider a natural model of online preference aggregation, where sets of preferred items $R_1, R_2, \ldots, R_t$ along with a demand for $k_t$ items in each $R_t$, appear online. Without prior knowledge of $(R_t, k_t)$, the learner…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Dimitris Fotakis , Thanasis Lianeas , Georgios Piliouras , Stratis Skoulakis

We study the problem of an online advertising system that wants to optimally spend an advertiser's given budget for a campaign across multiple platforms, without knowing the value for showing an ad to the users on those platforms. We model…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-03-26 Vashist Avadhanula , Riccardo Colini-Baldeschi , Stefano Leonardi , Karthik Abinav Sankararaman , Okke Schrijvers

Optimization algorithms appear in the core calculations of numerous Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning methods, as well as Engineering and Business applications. Following recent works on the theoretical deficiencies of AI, a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-29 Nikolaos P. Bakas , Vagelis Plevris , Andreas Langousis , Savvas A. Chatzichristofis

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Gyorgy Dosa , Zsolt Tuza

We study the online variant of the Min-Sum Set Cover (MSSC) problem, a generalization of the well-known list update problem. In the MSSC problem, an algorithm has to maintain the time-varying permutation of the list of $n$ elements, and…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-07-03 Mateusz Basiak , Marcin Bienkowski , Agnieszka Tatarczuk

We consider a class of zero-sum search games in which a Hider hides one or more target among a set of $n$ boxes. The boxes may require differing amount of time to search, and detection may be imperfect, so that there is a certain…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-12 Thomas Lidbetter

Consider the classical Min-Sum Set Cover problem: We are given a universe $\mathcal{U}$ of $n$ elements and a collection $\mathcal{S}$ of $k$ subsets of $\mathcal{U}$. Moreover, a cost function is associated with each set. The goal is to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Michał Szyfelbein

Given a graph, the minimum dominating set (MinDS) problem is to identify a smallest set $D$ of vertices such that every vertex not in $D$ is adjacent to at least one vertex in $D$. The MinDS problem is a classic $\mathcal{NP}$-hard problem…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Enqiang Zhu , Yu Zhang , Shengzhi Wang , Darren Strash , Chanjuan Liu

Consider the following online version of the submodular maximization problem under a matroid constraint: We are given a set of elements over which a matroid is defined. The goal is to incrementally choose a subset that remains independent…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2012-05-08 Niv Buchbinder , Joseph , Naor , R. Ravi , Mohit Singh

We investigate several online packing problems in which convex polygons arrive one by one and have to be placed irrevocably into a container, while the aim is to minimize the used space. Among other variants, we consider strip packing and…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Anders Aamand , Mikkel Abrahamsen , Lorenzo Beretta , Linda Kleist