Related papers: Pandora Box Problem with Nonobligatory Inspection:…
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…
We study algorithms for average-cost reinforcement learning problems with value function approximation. Our starting point is the recently proposed POLITEX algorithm, a version of policy iteration where the policy produced in each iteration…
We prove that it is NP-hard to properly PAC learn decision trees with queries, resolving a longstanding open problem in learning theory (Bshouty 1993; Guijarro-Lavin-Raghavan 1999; Mehta-Raghavan 2002; Feldman 2016). While there has been a…
The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…
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…
This paper proposes a new approach for approximate evaluation of #P-hard queries with probabilistic databases. In our approach, every query is evaluated entirely in the database engine by evaluating a fixed number of query plans, each…
In this paper we propose an improved approximation scheme for the Vector Bin Packing problem (VBP), based on the combination of (near-)optimal solution of the Linear Programming (LP) relaxation and a greedy (modified first-fit) heuristic.…
We study a two-dimensional generalization of the classical Bin Packing problem, denoted as 2D Demand Bin Packing. In this context, each bin is a horizontal timeline, and rectangular tasks (representing electric appliances or computational…
We consider the following generalization of the binary search problem. A search strategy is required to locate an unknown target node $t$ in a given tree $T$. Upon querying a node $v$ of the tree, the strategy receives as a reply an…
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 the knapsack problem under explorable uncertainty, we are given a knapsack instance with uncertain item profits. Instead of having access to the precise profits, we are only given uncertainty intervals that are guaranteed to contain the…
We develop a framework for obtaining polynomial time approximation schemes (PTAS) for a class of stochastic dynamic programs. Using our framework, we obtain the first PTAS for the following stochastic combinatorial optimization problems:…
Apart from the principles and methodologies inherited from Economics and Game Theory, the studies in Algorithmic Mechanism Design typically employ the worst-case analysis and approximation schemes of Theoretical Computer Science. For…
This paper presents theoretical and practical results for the bin packing problem with scenarios, a generalization of the classical bin packing problem which considers the presence of uncertain scenarios, of which only one is realized. For…
There has been growing progress on theoretical analyses for provably efficient learning in MDPs with linear function approximation, but much of the existing work has made strong assumptions to enable exploration by conventional exploration…
I introduce and study a nested search problem modeled as a tree structure that generalizes Weitzman (1979) in two ways: (1) search progresses incrementally, reflecting real-life scenarios where agents gradually acquire information about the…
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…
The art gallery problem enquires about the least number of guards that are sufficient to ensure that an art gallery, represented by a polygon $P$, is fully guarded. In 1998, the problems of finding the minimum number of point guards, vertex…
Finding schedules for pairwise meetings between the members of a complex social group without creating interpersonal conflict is challenging, especially when different relationships have different needs. We formally define and study the…
Optimal decision tree (\odt) is a fundamental problem arising in applications such as active learning, entity identification, and medical diagnosis. An instance of \odt is given by $m$ hypotheses, out of which an unknown ``true'' hypothesis…