Related papers: Improved Pattern-Avoidance Bounds for Greedy BSTs …
In the adaptive influence maximization problem, we are given a social network and a budget $k$, and we iteratively select $k$ nodes, called seeds, in order to maximize the expected number of nodes that are reached by an influence cascade…
We consider the problem of identifying a subset of nodes in a network that will enable the fastest spread of information in a decentralized environment.In a model of communication based on a random walk on an undirected graph, the optimal…
We study multi-finger binary search trees (BSTs), a far-reaching extension of the classical BST model, with connections to the well-studied $k$-server problem. Finger search is a popular technique for speeding up BST operations when a query…
Active learning is increasingly adopted for expensive multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems, but it involves a challenging subset selection problem, optimizing the batch acquisition score that quantifies the goodness of a…
Despite the great success of deep learning, recent works show that large deep neural networks are often highly redundant and can be significantly reduced in size. However, the theoretical question of how much we can prune a neural network…
Splay trees (Sleator and Tarjan) satisfy the so-called access lemma. Many of the nice properties of splay trees follow from it. What makes self-adjusting binary search trees (BSTs) satisfy the access lemma? After each access, self-adjusting…
We study online convex optimization in a setting where the learner seeks to minimize the sum of a per-round hitting cost and a movement cost which is incurred when changing decisions between rounds. We prove a new lower bound on the…
Coordinate descent with random coordinate selection is the current state of the art for many large scale optimization problems. However, greedy selection of the steepest coordinate on smooth problems can yield convergence rates independent…
We study sublinear time algorithms for estimating the size of maximum matching in graphs. Our main result is a $(\frac{1}{2}+\Omega(1))$-approximation algorithm which can be implemented in $O(n^{1+\epsilon})$ time, where $n$ is the number…
Most practical scheduling applications involve some uncertainty about the arriving times and lengths of the jobs. Stochastic online scheduling is a well-established model capturing this. Here the arrivals occur online, while the processing…
Greedy minimum weight spanning tree packings have proven to be useful in connectivity-related problems. We study the process of greedy minimum weight base packings in general matroids and explore its applications. For general matroids, we…
It is known that greedy methods perform well for maximizing monotone submodular functions. At the same time, such methods perform poorly in the face of non-monotonicity. In this paper, we show - arguably, surprisingly - that invoking the…
We present a technique that allows for improving on some relative greedy procedures by well-chosen (non-oblivious) local search algorithms. Relative greedy procedures are a particular type of greedy algorithm that start with a simple,…
In this paper we prove the efficacy of a simple greedy algorithm for a finite horizon online resource allocation/matching problem, when the corresponding static planning linear program (SPP) exhibits a non-degeneracy condition called the…
Most exploration algorithms search broadly until uncertainty is resolved. When the action space is too large to resolve within budget, practitioners default to $\varepsilon$-greedy, which bounds disruption but spends its override blindly.…
In the online Steiner tree problem, a sequence of points is revealed one-by-one: when a point arrives, we only have time to add a single edge connecting this point to the previous ones, and we want to minimize the total length of edges…
Makespan minimization on identical machines is a fundamental problem in online scheduling. The goal is to assign a sequence of jobs to $m$ identical parallel machines so as to minimize the maximum completion time of any job. Already in the…
Boosted decision trees enjoy popularity in a variety of applications; however, for large-scale datasets, the cost of training a decision tree in each round can be prohibitively expensive. Inspired by ideas from the multi-arm bandit…
The contextual bandit literature has traditionally focused on algorithms that address the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. In particular, greedy algorithms that exploit current estimates without any exploration may be sub-optimal in…
We prove direct-sum theorems for Wilber's two lower bounds [Wilber, FOCS'86] on the cost of access sequences in the binary search tree (BST) model. These bounds are central to the question of dynamic optimality [Sleator and Tarjan,…