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We consider chance-constrained binary knapsack problems, where the weights of items are independent random variables with the means and standard deviations known. The chance constraint can be reformulated as a second-order cone constraint…
We consider the problem of finding a lowest cost dominating set in a given disk graph containing $n$ disks. The problem has been extensively studied on subclasses of disk graphs, yet the best known approximation for disk graphs has remained…
Optimal stopping is the problem of determining when to stop a stochastic system in order to maximize reward, which is of practical importance in domains such as finance, operations management and healthcare. Existing methods for…
We consider the classic Facility Location problem on planar graphs (non-uniform, uncapacitated). Given an edge-weighted planar graph $G$, a set of clients $C\subseteq V(G)$, a set of facilities $F\subseteq V(G)$, and opening costs…
We study the quadratic penalty method (QPM) for smooth nonconvex optimization problems with equality constraints. Assuming the constraint violation satisfies the PL condition near the feasible set, we derive sharper worst-case complexity…
This paper studies an open question in the warehouse problem where a merchant trading a commodity tries to find an optimal inventory-trading policy to decide on purchase and sale quantities during a fixed time horizon in order to maximize…
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,…
Searching for objects amongst clutter is a key ability of visual systems. Speed and accuracy are often crucial: how can the visual system trade off these competing quantities for optimal performance in different tasks? How does the…
Traditional mathematical programming solvers require long computational times to solve constrained minimization problems of complex and large-scale physical systems. Therefore, these problems are often transformed into unconstrained ones,…
A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…
We present a new generalization of the extensible bin packing with unequal bin sizes problem. In our generalization the cost of exceeding the bin size depends on the index of the bin and not only on the amount in which the size of the bin…
The Bin Packing Problem (BPP) has attracted enthusiastic research interest recently, owing to widespread applications in logistics and warehousing environments. It is truly essential to optimize the bin packing to enable more objects to be…
This paper studies the fixed budget formulation of the Ranking and Selection (R&S) problem with independent normal samples, where the goal is to investigate different algorithms' convergence rate in terms of their resulting probability of…
Label tree-based algorithms are widely used to tackle multi-class and multi-label problems with a large number of labels. We focus on a particular subclass of these algorithms that use probabilistic classifiers in the tree nodes. Examples…
We study reward design strategies for incentivizing a reinforcement learning agent to adopt a policy from a set of admissible policies. The goal of the reward designer is to modify the underlying reward function cost-efficiently while…
Sequential multi-class diagnosis, also known as multi-hypothesis testing, is a classical sequential decision problem with broad applications. However, the optimal solution remains, in general, unknown as the dynamic program suffers from the…
Optimization is fundamental in many areas of science, from computer science and information theory to engineering and statistical physics, as well as to biology or social sciences. It typically involves a large number of variables and a…
We pose the fine-grained hardness hypothesis that the textbook algorithm for the NFA Acceptance problem is optimal up to subpolynomial factors, even for dense NFAs and fixed alphabets. We show that this barrier appears in many variations…
Consider the following generalization of the classic binary search problem: A searcher is required to find a hidden target vertex $x$ in a graph $G$. To do so, they iteratively perform queries to an oracle, each about a chosen vertex $v$.…
We present an improved $(\epsilon, \delta)$-jointly differentially private algorithm for packing problems. Our algorithm gives a feasible output that is approximately optimal up to an $\alpha n$ additive factor as long as the supply of each…