Related papers: Adaptivity Gaps for the Stochastic Boolean Functio…
We consider the Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation (SBFE) problem in the well-studied case of $k$-of-$n$ functions: There are independent Boolean random variables $x_1,\dots,x_n$ where each variable $i$ has a known probability $p_i$ of…
Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation (SBFE) is the problem of determining the value of a given Boolean function $f$ on an unknown input $x$, when each bit of $x_i$ of $x$ can only be determined by paying a given associated cost $c_i$.…
Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation is the problem of determining the value of a given Boolean function f on an unknown input x, when each bit of x_i of x can only be determined by paying an associated cost c_i. The assumption is that x…
We give two approximation algorithms solving the Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation (SBFE) problem for symmetric Boolean functions. The first is an $O(\log n)$-approximation algorithm, based on the submodular goal-value approach of…
Consider a kidney-exchange application where we want to find a max-matching in a random graph. To find whether an edge $e$ exists, we need to perform an expensive test, in which case the edge $e$ appears independently with a \emph{known}…
The model of relative-error property testing of Boolean functions has been the subject of significant recent research effort [CDH+24][CPPS25a][CPPS25b] In this paper we consider the problem of relative-error testing an unknown and arbitrary…
Suppose we are given a submodular function $f$ over a set of elements, and we want to maximize its value subject to certain constraints. Good approximation algorithms are known for such problems under both monotone and non-monotone…
In this paper, we study the stochastic probing problem under a general monotone norm objective. Given a ground set $U = [n]$, each element $i \in U$ has an independent nonnegative random variable $X_i$ with known distribution. Probing an…
We show that every algorithm for testing $n$-variate Boolean functions for monotonicity must have query complexity $\tilde{\Omega}(n^{1/4})$. All previous lower bounds for this problem were designed for non-adaptive algorithms and, as a…
The input to the stochastic orienteering problem consists of a budget $B$ and metric $(V,d)$ where each vertex $v$ has a job with deterministic reward and random processing time (drawn from a known distribution). The processing times are…
Sequential testing problems involve a complex system with several components, each of which is "working" with some independent probability. The outcome of each component can be determined by performing a test, which incurs some cost. The…
We give an adaptive algorithm which tests whether an unknown Boolean function $f\colon \{0, 1\}^n \to\{0, 1\}$ is unate, i.e. every variable of $f$ is either non-decreasing or non-increasing, or $\epsilon$-far from unate with one-sided…
In stochastic combinatorial optimization, algorithms differ in their adaptivity: whether or not they query realized randomness and adapt to it. Dean et al. (FOCS '04) formalize the adaptivity gap, which compares the performance of fully…
We study the Stochastic Boolean Function Certification (SBFC) problem, where we are given $n$ Bernoulli random variables $\{X_e: e \in U\}$ on a ground set $U$ of $n$ elements with joint distribution $p$, a Boolean function $f: 2^U \to \{0,…
We consider the problem of testing whether an unknown Boolean function $f$ is monotone versus $\epsilon$-far from every monotone function. The two main results of this paper are a new lower bound and a new algorithm for this well-studied…
This paper provides lower bounds on the convergence rate of Derivative Free Optimization (DFO) with noisy function evaluations, exposing a fundamental and unavoidable gap between the performance of algorithms with access to gradients and…
We study the $\textit{average-case deterministic query complexity}$ of boolean functions under a $\textit{uniform input distribution}$, denoted by $\mathrm{D}_\mathrm{ave}(f)$, the minimum average depth of zero-error decision trees that…
We present an adaptive tester for the unateness property of Boolean functions. Given a function $f:\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ the tester makes $O(n \log(n)/\epsilon)$ adaptive queries to the function. The tester always accepts a unate function,…
In this paper, a new gradient-based optimization approach by automatically adjusting the learning rate is proposed. This approach can be applied to design non-adaptive learning rate and adaptive learning rate. Firstly, I will introduce the…
This work presents the first projection-free algorithm to solve stochastic bi-level optimization problems, where the objective function depends on the solution of another stochastic optimization problem. The proposed $\textbf{S}$tochastic…