Related papers: Randomized Binary and Tree Search under Pressure
We initiate a study of a query-driven approach to designing partition trees for range-searching problems. Our model assumes that a data structure is to be built for an unknown query distribution that we can access through a sampling oracle,…
Motivated by programmatic advertising optimization, we consider the task of sequentially allocating budget across a set of resources. At every time step, a feasible allocation is chosen and only a corresponding random return is observed.…
In search problems, a mobile searcher seeks to locate a target that hides in some unknown position of the environment. Such problems are typically considered to be of an on-line nature, in that the input is unknown to the searcher, and the…
Consider the following abstract coin tossing problem: Given a set of $n$ coins with unknown biases, find the most biased coin using a minimal number of coin tosses. This is a common abstraction of various exploration problems in theoretical…
The Hierarchical Memory Model (HMM) of computation is similar to the standard Random Access Machine (RAM) model except that the HMM has a non-uniform memory organized in a hierarchy of levels numbered 1 through h. The cost of accessing a…
Sorting is a foundational problem in computer science that is typically employed on sequences or total orders. More recently, a more general form of sorting on partially ordered sets (or posets), where some pairs of elements are…
Consider the following classical search problem: given a target point $p\in \Re$, starting at the origin, find $p$ with minimum cost, where cost is defined as the distance travelled. Let $D$ be the distance of $p$ from the origin. When no…
Ad auctions in sponsored search support ``broad match'' that allows an advertiser to target a large number of queries while bidding only on a limited number. While giving more expressiveness to advertisers, this feature makes it challenging…
Decision Tree is a classic formulation of active learning: given $n$ hypotheses with nonnegative weights summing to 1 and a set of tests that each partition the hypotheses, output a decision tree using the provided tests that uniquely…
The bin packing problem is to find the minimum number of bins of size one to pack a list of items with sizes $a_1,..., a_n$ in $(0,1]$. Using uniform sampling, which selects a random element from the input list each time, we develop a…
We introduce two novel tree search algorithms that use a policy to guide search. The first algorithm is a best-first enumeration that uses a cost function that allows us to prove an upper bound on the number of nodes to be expanded before…
This paper deals with the complexity of the problem of computing a pure Nash equilibrium for discrete preference games and network coordination games beyond $O(\log n)$-treewidth and tree metric spaces. First, we estimate the number of…
We consider the problem of routing for logistics purposes, in a contested environment where an adversary attempts to disrupt the vehicle along the chosen route. We construct a game-theoretic model that captures the problem of optimal…
The binary neural network, largely saving the storage and computation, serves as a promising technique for deploying deep models on resource-limited devices. However, the binarization inevitably causes severe information loss, and even…
Suppose a target is hidden in one of the vertices of an edge-weighted graph according to a known probability distribution. The expanding search problem asks for a search sequence of the vertices so as to minimize the expected time for…
We study an online stochastic matching problem in which an algorithm sequentially matches $U$ users to $K$ arms, aiming to maximize cumulative reward over $T$ rounds under budget constraints. Without structural assumptions, computing the…
"Guess Who?" is a popular two player game where players ask "Yes"/"No" questions to search for their opponent's secret identity from a pool of possible candidates. This is modeled as a simple stochastic game. Using this model, the optimal…
One or more searchers must capture an invisible evader hiding in the nodes of a graph. We study this graph search problem; we emphasize that we study the capture of a node-located evader, which has received less attention than edge search.…
We consider a minimal model of persistent random searcher with short range memory. We calculate exactly for such searcher the mean first-passage time to a target in a bounded domain and find that it admits a non trivial minimum as function…
We investigate pruning in search trees of so-called quantified integer linear programs (QIPs). QIPs consist of a set of linear inequalities and a minimax objective function, where some variables are existentially and others are universally…