Related papers: Pandora Box Problem with Nonobligatory Inspection:…
We study a general class of bicriteria network design problems. A generic problem in this class is as follows: Given an undirected graph and two minimization objectives (under different cost functions), with a budget specified on the first,…
We consider various stochastic models that incorporate the notion of risk-averseness into the standard 2-stage recourse model, and develop novel techniques for solving the algorithmic problems arising in these models. A key notable feature…
Set Cover is a classic NP-hard problem; as shown by Slav\'{i}k (1997) the greedy algorithm gives an approximation ratio of $\ln n - \ln \ln n + \Theta(1)$. A series of works by Lund \& Yannakakis (1994), Feige (1998), Moshkovitz (2015) have…
Makespan minimization on unrelated machines is a classic problem in approximation algorithms. No polynomial time $(2-\delta)$-approximation algorithm is known for the problem for constant $\delta> 0$. This is true even for certain special…
Inspired by the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb testing problem [arXiv:hep-th/9305002], we introduce a new query complexity model, which we call bomb query complexity $B(f)$. We investigate its relationship with the usual quantum query complexity…
Unique Sink Orientations (USOs) are an appealing abstraction of several major optimization problems of applied mathematics such as for instance Linear Programming (LP), Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) or 2-player Turn Based Stochastic…
Consider the following generalization of the classic binary search problem: a searcher is required to find a hidden vertex $x$ in a tree $T$. To do so, they iteratively perform queries to an oracle, each about a chosen vertex $v$. After…
Explorable heap selection is the problem of selecting the $n$th smallest value in a binary heap. The key values can only be accessed by traversing through the underlying infinite binary tree, and the complexity of the algorithm is measured…
What is the power of polynomial-time quantum computation with access to an NP oracle? In this work, we focus on two fundamental tasks from the study of Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problems: search-to-decision reductions, and approximate…
Recently proposed models which learn to write computer programs from data use either input/output examples or rich execution traces. Instead, we argue that a novel alternative is to use a glass-box loss function, given as a program itself…
We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with a set of target states and every transition is associated with an integer cost. The optimization objective we study asks to minimize the expected total cost till the…
We study the complexity of a fundamental algorithm for fairly allocating indivisible items, the round-robin algorithm. For $n$ agents and $m$ items, we show that the algorithm can be implemented in time $O(nm\log(m/n))$ in the worst case.…
We investigate the relation between $\delta$ and $\epsilon$ required for obtaining a $(1+\delta)$-approximation in time $N^{2-\epsilon}$ for closest pair problems under various distance metrics, and for other related problems in…
Value iteration is a popular algorithm for finding near optimal policies for POMDPs. It is inefficient due to the need to account for the entire belief space, which necessitates the solution of large numbers of linear programs. In this…
In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for exploratory projection pursuit. The basis of the algorithm is the insight that previous approaches used fairly narrow definitions of interestingness / non interestingness. We argue that allowing…
Robust optimization is a popular paradigm for modeling and solving two- and multi-stage decision-making problems affected by uncertainty. In many real-world applications, the time of information discovery is decision-dependent and the…
We revisit various PTAS's (Polynomial Time Approximation Schemes) for minimization versions of dense problems, and show that they can be performed with sublinear query complexity. This means that not only do we obtain a…
The problem of high-dimensional path-dependent optimal stopping (OS) is important to multiple academic communities and applications. Modern OS tasks often have a large number of decision epochs, and complicated non-Markovian dynamics,…
Having access to an exploring restart distribution (the so-called wide coverage assumption) is critical with policy gradient methods. This is due to the fact that, while the objective function is insensitive to updates in unlikely states,…
We consider optimal route planning when the objective function is a general nonlinear and non-monotonic function. Such an objective models user behavior more accurately, for example, when a user is risk-averse, or the utility function needs…