Related papers: The secretary problem with items arriving accordin…
The n-way number partitioning problem, a fundamental challenge in combinatorial optimization, has significant implications for applications such as fair division and machine scheduling. Despite these problems being NP-hard, many…
Permutation pattern-avoidance is a central concept of both enumerative and extremal combinatorics. In this paper we study the effect of permutation pattern-avoidance on the complexity of optimization problems. In the context of the dynamic…
Permutation patterns and pattern avoidance have been intensively studied in combinatorics and computer science, going back at least to the seminal work of Knuth on stack-sorting (1968). Perhaps the most natural algorithmic question in this…
We study bicriteria versions of Makespan Minimization on Unrelated Machines and Santa Claus by allowing a constrained number of rejections. Given an instance of Makespan Minimization on Unrelated Machines where the optimal makespan for…
Prophet inequalities for rewards maximization are fundamental to optimal stopping theory with extensive applications to mechanism design and online optimization. We study the \emph{cost minimization} counterpart of the classical prophet…
The knapsack problem is one of the classical problems in combinatorial optimization: Given a set of items, each specified by its size and profit, the goal is to find a maximum profit packing into a knapsack of bounded capacity. In the…
The problem of ranking can be described as follows. We have a set of combinatorial objects $S$, such as, say, the k-subsets of n things, and we can imagine that they have been arranged in some list, say lexicographically, and we want to…
We study the following one-way asymmetric transmission problem, also a variant of model-based compressed sensing: a resource-limited encoder has to report a small set $S$ from a universe of $N$ items to a more powerful decoder (server). The…
The most well-known conjecture in the context of matroid secretary problems claims the existence of a constant-factor approximation applicable to any matroid. Whereas this conjecture remains open, modified forms of it were shown to be true,…
The Matroid Secretary Conjecture is a notorious open problem in online optimization. It claims the existence of an $O(1)$-competitive algorithm for the Matroid Secretary Problem (MSP). Here, the elements of a weighted matroid appear…
Constrained submodular maximization problems have long been studied, with near-optimal results known under a variety of constraints when the submodular function is monotone. The case of non-monotone submodular maximization is less…
The setting of the classic prophet inequality is as follows: a gambler is shown the probability distributions of $n$ independent, non-negative random variables with finite expectations. In their indexed order, a value is drawn from each…
Given positive integers $n$ and $m$, let $p_n(m)$ be the probability that a uniform random permutation of $[n]$ has order exactly $m$. We show that, as $n \to \infty$, the maximum of $p_n(m)$ over all $m$ is asymptotic to $1/n$, the…
We study an online version of the max-min fair allocation problem for indivisible items. In this problem, items arrive one by one, and each item must be allocated irrevocably on arrival to one of $n$ agents, who have additive valuations for…
We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…
A common problem in machine learning is to rank a set of n items based on pairwise comparisons. Here ranking refers to partitioning the items into sets of pre-specified sizes according to their scores, which includes identification of the…
We study the problem of identifying an n-bit string using a single quantum query to an oracle that computes the Hamming distance between the query and hidden strings. The standard action of the oracle on a response register of dimension r…
We study single-sample prophet inequalities (SSPIs), i.e., prophet inequalities where only a single sample from each prior distribution is available. Besides a direct, and optimal, SSPI for the basic single choice problem [Rubinstein et…
Babaioff et al. [BIK2007] introduced the matroid secretary problem in 2007, a natural extension of the classic single-choice secretary problem to matroids, and conjectured that a constant-competitive online algorithm exists. The conjecture…
We develop a novel mathematical programming approximation framework to tackle the stochastic knapsack problem. In this problem, the decision maker considers items for which either weights or values, or both, are random. The aim is to select…