Related papers: Fighting Pickpocketing using a Choice-based Resour…
Public and private institutions must often allocate scare resources under uncertainty. Banks, for example, extend credit to loan applicants based in part on their estimated likelihood of repaying a loan. But when the quality of information…
The effectiveness of advertising in e-commerce largely depends on the ability of merchants to bid on and win impressions for their targeted users. The bidding procedure is highly complex due to various factors such as market competition,…
We develop an analytical Stackelberg game framework for optimal resource allocation in a sequential attacker--defender setting with a finite set of assets and probabilistic attacks. The defender commits to a mixed protection strategy, after…
In this paper we consider multiple constrained resource allocation problems, where the constraints can be specified by formulating activity dependency restrictions or by using game-theoretic models. All the problems are focused on generic…
Street-level bureaucrats, such as caseworkers and border guards routinely face the dilemma of whether to follow rigid policy or exercise discretion based on professional judgement. However, frequent overrides threaten consistency and…
We investigate the adaptive Ambush strategy in cyclic models following the rules of the spatial rock-paper-scissors game. In our model, individuals of one species possess cognitive abilities to perceive environmental cues and assess the…
In this paper, we consider a best action identification problem in the stochastic linear bandit setup with a fixed confident constraint. In the considered best action identification problem, instead of minimizing the accumulative regret as…
Covert planning refers to a class of constrained planning problems where an agent aims to accomplish a task with minimal information leaked to a passive observer to avoid detection. However, existing methods of covert planning often…
Algorithmic predictions are emerging as a promising solution concept for efficiently allocating societal resources. Fueling their use is an underlying assumption that such systems are necessary to identify individuals for interventions. We…
This paper studies the problem of optimally allocating treatments in the presence of spillover effects, using information from a (quasi-)experiment. I introduce a method that maximizes the sample analog of average social welfare when…
Resource allocation takes place in various types of real-world complex systems such as urban traf- fic, social services institutions, economical and ecosystems. Mathematically, the dynamical process of complex resource allocation can be…
Sequential portfolio selection has attracted increasing interests in the machine learning and quantitative finance communities in recent years. As a mathematical framework for reinforcement learning policies, the stochastic multi-armed…
We consider allocation of a resource to multiple interested users with a constraint that if the resource is allocated to user $i$ then it can not be allocated simultaneously to a predefined set of users $\cS_i$ . This scenario arises in…
We present a Defense/Attack resource allocation model, where Defender has some number of ``locks" to protect $n$ vulnerable boxes (sites), and Attacker is trying to destroy these boxes, having $m$ ``bombs" that can be placed into the boxes.…
Pick-and-place is an important manipulation task in domestic or manufacturing applications. There exist many works focusing on grasp detection with high picking success rate but lacking consideration of downstream manipulation tasks (e.g.,…
Volunteer-based food rescue platforms tackle food waste by matching surplus food to communities in need. These platforms face the dual problem of maintaining volunteer engagement and maximizing the food rescued. Existing algorithms to…
There is an extensive literature that studies how to find optimal policies in resource allocation problems, taking the underlying design parameters that define the allocation, such as what data is collected, how many people can be served,…
We consider a constrained, pure exploration, stochastic multi-armed bandit formulation under a fixed budget. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution and is described by multiple attributes that are a…
We consider the problem of online allocation subject to a long-term fairness penalty. Contrary to existing works, however, we do not assume that the decision-maker observes the protected attributes -- which is often unrealistic in practice.…
Many countries are facing energy shortage today and most of the global energy is consumed by HVAC systems in buildings. For the scenarios where the energy system is not sufficiently supplied to HVAC systems, a priority-based allocation…