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Army cadets obtain occupations through a centralized process. Three objectives -- increasing retention, aligning talent, and enhancing trust -- have guided reforms to this process since 2006. West Point's mechanism for the Class of 2020…
Minimalist market design is an economic design framework developed from the perspective of an outsider -- one seeking to improve real institutions without a commission or official mandate. It offers a structured, "minimally invasive" method…
After the COVID pandemic, student leadership development within the brigade of midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy (USNA) was severely degraded due to reduced student interaction from isolation and remote learning. Brigade…
Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have been successfully applied in industry for their ability to address complex, distributed problems, especially in IoT-based systems. Their efficiency in achieving given objectives and meeting design requirements…
A large number of heuristics have been proposed to optimize the reinforcement fine-tuning of LLMs. However, inconsistent claims are made from time to time, making this area elusive. Reflecting on this situation, two fundamental questions…
Reinforcement learning competitions have formed the basis for standard research benchmarks, galvanized advances in the state-of-the-art, and shaped the direction of the field. Despite this, a majority of challenges suffer from the same…
Strategy-proofness is a fundamental desideratum in mechanism design, ensuring truthful reporting and robust participation. Stability is another central requirement in matching markets, widely adopted in applications such as school choice…
We formulate and study the algorithmic mechanism design problem for a general class of resource allocation settings, where the center redistributes the private resources brought by individuals. Money transfer is forbidden. Distinct from the…
Service system performance depends on how participants respond to design choices, but modeling these responses is hard due to the complexity of human behavior. We introduce an LLM-powered multi-agent simulation (LLM-MAS) framework for…
The software engineering research community faces a systemic crisis: peer review is failing under growing submissions, misaligned incentives, and reviewer fatigue. Community surveys reveal that researchers perceive the process as "broken."…
We describe mechanisms for the allocation of a scarce resource among multiple users in a way that is efficient, fair, and strategy-proof, but when users do not know their resource requirements. The mechanism is repeated for multiple rounds…
Military is one of many industries that is more computer-dependent than ever before, from soldiers with computerized weapons, and tactical wireless devices, to commanders with advanced battle management, command and control systems.…
Given an initial matching and a policy objective on the distribution of agent types to institutions, we study the existence of a mechanism that weakly improves the distributional objective and satisfies constrained efficiency, individual…
The reinforcement fine-tuning area is undergoing an explosion papers largely on optimizing design choices. Though performance gains are often claimed, inconsistent conclusions also arise from time to time, making the progress illusive.…
Mechanism design is essentially reverse engineering of games and involves inducing a game among strategic agents in a way that the induced game satisfies a set of desired properties in an equilibrium of the game. Desirable properties for a…
We consider the problem of optimally designing a system for repeated use under uncertainty. We develop a modeling framework that integrates design and operational phases, which are represented by a mixed-integer program and discounted-cost…
The academic job market for new statisticians is highly congested at the interview stage, where departments must rank and select candidates from large applicant pools without credible signals of candidate interest. As a result, interviews…
With the increase of order fulfillment options and business objectives taken into consideration in the deciding process, order fulfillment deciding is becoming more and more complex. For example, with the advent of ship from store retailers…
The intermittent nature of renewable energy resources creates extra challenges in the operation and control of the electricity grid. Demand flexibility markets can help in dealing with these challenges by introducing incentives for…
Training effective software engineering agents requires large volumes of task-specific trajectories, incurring substantial data construction costs. Inspired by the "Less-Is-More" hypothesis in mathematical reasoning, we investigate its…