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Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

We study the problem of efficiently and fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with identical and additive valuations for the goods. The objective is to maximize the Nash social welfare, which is the geometric mean of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-01-06 Asei Inoue , Yusuke Kobayashi

Now that machine learning algorithms lie at the center of many resource allocation pipelines, computer scientists have been unwittingly cast as partial social planners. Given this state of affairs, important questions follow. What is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-02 Lily Hu , Yiling Chen

We study the problem of approximating maximum Nash social welfare (NSW) when allocating m indivisible items among n asymmetric agents with submodular valuations. The NSW is a well-established notion of fairness and efficiency, defined as…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Jugal Garg , Pooja Kulkarni , Rucha Kulkarni

We consider the problem of allocating a set of divisible goods to $N$ agents in an online manner, aiming to maximize the Nash social welfare, a widely studied objective which provides a balance between fairness and efficiency. The goods…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-08-04 Siddhartha Banerjee , Vasilis Gkatzelis , Artur Gorokh , Billy Jin

We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among $n$ agents with the objective of maximizing Nash social welfare (NSW). This welfare function is defined as the geometric mean of the agents' valuations and, hence, it strikes a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-18 Siddharth Barman , Anand Krishna , Pooja Kulkarni , Shivika Narang

In this paper, we present new results on the fair and efficient allocation of indivisible goods to agents whose preferences correspond to {\em matroid rank functions}. This is a versatile valuation class with several desirable properties…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Nawal Benabbou , Mithun Chakraborty , Ayumi Igarashi , Yair Zick

We study incentive-compatible mechanisms that maximize the Nash Social Welfare. Since traditional incentive-compatible mechanisms cannot maximize the Nash Social Welfare even approximately, we propose changing the traditional model.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Shahar Dobzinski , Sigal Oren , Jan Vondrak

We propose social welfare optimization as a general paradigm for formalizing fairness in AI systems. We argue that optimization models allow formulation of a wide range of fairness criteria as social welfare functions, while enabling AI to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-07-21 Violet Xinying Chen , J. N. Hooker

We study the problem of maximizing Nash welfare (MNW) while allocating indivisible goods to asymmetric agents. The Nash welfare of an allocation is the weighted geometric mean of agents' utilities, and the allocation with maximum Nash…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-02 Jugal Garg , Edin Husić , Aniket Murhekar , László Végh

For any $\varepsilon>0$, we give a simple, deterministic $(4+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for the Nash social welfare (NSW) problem under submodular valuations. We also consider the asymmetric variant of the problem, where the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Jugal Garg , Edin Husić , Wenzheng Li , László A. Végh , Jan Vondrák

We consider the task of assigning indivisible goods to a set of agents in a fair manner. Our notion of fairness is Nash social welfare, i.e., the goal is to maximize the geometric mean of the utilities of the agents. Each good comes in…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-05-13 Bhaskar Chaudhury , Yun Kuen Cheung , Jugal Garg , Naveen Garg , Martin Hoefer , Kurt Mehlhorn

We study the problem of allocating $m$ items to $n$ agents subject to maximizing the Nash social welfare (NSW) objective. We write a novel convex programming relaxation for this problem, and we show that a simple randomized rounding…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-09-26 Nima Anari , Shayan Oveis Gharan , Amin Saberi , Mohit Singh

We study the problem of allocating a set of indivisible goods among a set of agents with \emph{2-value additive valuations}. In this setting, each good is valued either $1$ or $p/q$, for some fixed co-prime numbers $p,q\in \mathbb{N}$ such…

Nearest Neighbor Search (NNS) is a fundamental problem in data structures with wide-ranging applications, such as web search, recommendation systems, and, more recently, retrieval-augmented generations (RAG). In such recent applications, in…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Siddharth Barman , Nirjhar Das , Shivam Gupta , Kirankumar Shiragur

In traditional reinforcement learning (RL), the learner aims to solve a single objective optimization problem: find the policy that maximizes expected reward. However, in many real-world settings, it is important to optimize over multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Eric Eaton , Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

Many policy problems involve designing individualized treatment allocation rules to maximize the equilibrium social welfare of interacting agents. Focusing on large-scale simultaneous decision games with strategic complementarities, we…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-11-12 Guanyi Wang

We consider the problem of online multi-agent Nash social welfare (NSW) maximization. While previous works of Hossain et al. [2021], Jones et al. [2023] study similar problems in stochastic multi-agent multi-armed bandits and show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Mengxiao Zhang , Ramiro Deo-Campo Vuong , Haipeng Luo

Matching platforms, such as online dating services and job recommendations, have become increasingly prevalent. For the success of these platforms, it is crucial to design reciprocal recommender systems (RRSs) that not only increase the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Yoji Tomita , Tomohiko Yokoyama

We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among agents that have an identical subadditive valuation over the goods. The extent of fairness and efficiency of allocations is measured by the generalized means of the values that the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-05-04 Siddharth Barman , Ranjani G. Sundaram