Related papers: Top-$K$ ranking with a monotone adversary
We consider the problem of ranking a set of items from pairwise comparisons in the presence of features associated with the items. Recent works have established that $O(n\log(n))$ samples are needed to rank well when there is no feature…
Given a large graph, the densest-subgraph problem asks to find a subgraph with maximum average degree. When considering the top-$k$ version of this problem, a na\"ive solution is to iteratively find the densest subgraph and remove it in…
Maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) is arguably the most important tool for statisticians, and many methods have been developed to find the MLE. We present a new inequality involving posterior distributions of a latent variable that holds…
We consider the problem of finding an independent set of maximum weight simultaneously contained in $k$ matroids over a common ground set. This $k$-matroid intersection problem appears naturally in many contexts, for example in generalizing…
In the stochastic weighted matching problem, the goal is to find a large-weight matching of a graph when we are uncertain about the existence of its edges. In particular, each edge $e$ has a known weight $w_e$ but is realized independently…
Competition is ubiquitous in many complex biological, social, and technological systems, playing an integral role in the evolutionary dynamics of the systems. It is often useful to determine the dominance hierarchy or the rankings of the…
We consider the class of optimization problems arising from computationally intensive L1-regularized M-estimators, where the function or gradient values are very expensive to compute. A particular instance of interest is the L1-regularized…
In this paper, we study a popular method for inference of the Bradley-Terry model parameters, namely the MM algorithm, for maximum likelihood estimation and maximum a posteriori probability estimation. This class of models includes the…
Sorting is one of the most basic primitives in many algorithms and data analysis tasks. Comparison-based sorting algorithms, like quick-sort and merge-sort, are known to be optimal when the outcome of each comparison is error-free. However,…
In this paper, we study the weighted $k$-server problem on the uniform metric in both the offline and online settings. We start with the offline setting. In contrast to the (unweighted) $k$-server problem which has a polynomial-time…
Enumerating maximal $k$-biplexes (MBPs) of a bipartite graph has been used for applications such as fraud detection. Nevertheless, there usually exists an exponential number of MBPs, which brings up two issues when enumerating MBPs, namely…
This paper introduces the \emph{$d$-distance matching problem}, in which we are given a bipartite graph $G=(S,T;E)$ with $S=\{s_1,\dots,s_n\}$, a weight function on the edges and an integer $d\in\mathbb Z_+$. The goal is to find a maximum…
We consider the following stochastic matching problem on both weighted and unweighted graphs: A graph $G(V, E)$ along with a parameter $p \in (0, 1)$ is given in the input. Each edge of $G$ is realized independently with probability $p$.…
We consider the edge-weighted online stochastic matching problem, in which an edge-weighted bipartite graph G=(I\cup J, E) with offline vertices J and online vertex types I is given. The online vertices have types sampled from I with…
In a single-agent setting, reinforcement learning (RL) tasks can be cast into an inference problem by introducing a binary random variable o, which stands for the "optimality". In this paper, we redefine the binary random variable o in…
We consider the problem of probably approximately correct (PAC) ranking $n$ items by adaptively eliciting subset-wise preference feedback. At each round, the learner chooses a subset of $k$ items and observes stochastic feedback indicating…
This paper unifies the theory of consistent-set maximization for robust outlier detection in a simultaneous localization and mapping framework. We first describe the notion of pairwise consistency before discussing how a consistency graph…
Skew normal mixture models provide a more flexible framework than the popular normal mixtures for modelling heterogeneous data with asymmetric behaviors. Due to the unboundedness of likelihood function and the divergency of shape…
We consider the Maximum-weight Matching (MWM) problem in the streaming sliding window model of computation. In this model, the input consists of a sequence of weighted edges on a given vertex set $V$ of size $n$. The objective is to…
We study the problem of optimal leader selection in consensus networks under two performance measures (1) formation coherence when subject to additive perturbations, as quantified by the steady-state variance of the deviation from the…