Related papers: Pandora's Problem with Combinatorial Cost
Two general algorithms based on opportunity costs are given for approximating a revenue-maximizing set of bids an auctioneer should accept, in a combinatorial auction in which each bidder offers a price for some subset of the available…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…
The Pandora's Box problem models the search for the best alternative when evaluation is costly. In the simplest variant, a decision maker is presented with $n$ boxes, each associated with a cost of inspection and a hidden random reward. The…
We introduce a search problem generalizing the typical setting of Binary Search on the line. Similar to the setting for Binary Search, a target is chosen adversarially on the line, and in response to a query, the algorithm learns whether…
We consider max-weighted matching with costs for learning the weights, modeled as a "Pandora's Box" on each endpoint of an edge. Each vertex has an initially-unknown value for being matched to a neighbor, and an algorithm must pay some cost…
In this paper a class of combinatorial optimization problems with uncertain costs is discussed. The uncertainty is modeled by specifying a discrete scenario set containing $K$ distinct cost scenarios. The Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA for…
Consider the following generalization of the classic binary search problem: a searcher is required to find a hidden vertex $x$ in a tree $T$. To do so, they iteratively perform queries to an oracle, each about a chosen vertex $v$. After…
Consider a network design application where we wish to lay down a minimum-cost spanning tree in a given graph; however, we only have stochastic information about the edge costs. To learn the precise cost of any edge, we have to conduct a…
The easy-hard-easy pattern in the difficulty of combinatorial search problems as constraints are added has been explained as due to a competition between the decrease in number of solutions and increased pruning. We test the generality of…
In 1979, Weitzman introduced Pandora's box problem as a framework for sequential search with costly inspections. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in Pandora's box problem, particularly among researchers working at the…
Finding global optima in high-dimensional optimization problems is extremely challenging since the number of function evaluations required to sufficiently explore the search space increases exponentially with its dimensionality.…
We consider online variations of the Pandora's box problem (Weitzman. 1979), a standard model for understanding issues related to the cost of acquiring information for decision-making. Our problem generalizes both the classic Pandora's box…
The Pandora's Box problem and its extensions capture optimization problems with stochastic input where the algorithm can obtain instantiations of input random variables at some cost. To our knowledge, all previous work on this class of…
Two central problems in Stochastic Optimization are Min Sum Set Cover and Pandora's Box. In Pandora's Box, we are presented with $n$ boxes, each containing an unknown value and the goal is to open the boxes in some order to minimize the sum…
We study \emph{combinatorial procurement auctions}, where a buyer with a valuation function $v$ and budget $B$ wishes to buy a set of items. Each item $i$ has a cost $c_i$ and the buyer is interested in a set $S$ that maximizes $v(S)$…
In this paper, we investigate a class of submodular problems which in general are very hard. These include minimizing a submodular cost function under combinatorial constraints, which include cuts, matchings, paths, etc., optimizing a…
Efficient probabilistic inference by variable elimination in graphical models requires an optimal elimination order. However, finding an optimal order is a challenging combinatorial optimisation problem for models with a large number of…
We propose a new approach for solving combinatorial optimization problem by utilizing the mechanism of chases and escapes, which has a long history in mathematics. In addition to the well-used steepest descent and neighboring search, we…
Submodular maximization is a general optimization problem with a wide range of applications in machine learning (e.g., active learning, clustering, and feature selection). In large-scale optimization, the parallel running time of an…
Join ordering is the NP-hard problem of selecting the most efficient order in which to evaluate joins (conjunctive, binary operators) in a database query. Because query execution performance critically depends on this choice, join ordering…