Related papers: Pandora's Box Problem With Time Constraints
We study the Pandora's Box problem in an online learning setting with semi-bandit feedback. In each round, the learner sequentially pays to open up to $n$ boxes with unknown reward distributions, observes rewards upon opening, and decides…
Martin Weitzman's "Pandora's problem" furnishes the mathematical basis for optimal search theory in economics. Nearly 40 years later, Laura Doval introduced a version of the problem in which the searcher is not obligated to pay the cost of…
Pandora's problem is a fundamental model in economics that studies optimal search strategies under costly inspection. In this paper we initiate the study of Pandora's problem with combinatorial costs, capturing many real-life scenarios…
In this paper, we study the Markovian Pandora's Box Problem, where decisions are governed by both order constraints and Markovianly correlated rewards, structured within a shared directed acyclic graph. To the best of our knowledge,…
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…
Robust optimization is a popular paradigm for modeling and solving two- and multi-stage decision-making problems affected by uncertainty. In many real-world applications, the time of information discovery is decision-dependent and the…
We explore a multiple-stage variant of the min-max robust selection problem with budgeted uncertainty that includes queries. First, one queries a subset of items and gets the exact values of their uncertain parameters. Given this…
We consider a class of optimization problems over stochastic variables where the algorithm can learn information about the value of any variable through a series of costly steps; we model this information acquisition process as a Markov…
Humanity has been fascinated by the pursuit of fortune since time immemorial, and many successful outcomes benefit from strokes of luck. But success is subject to complexity, uncertainty, and change - and at times becoming increasingly…
We consider a sequential inspection game where an inspector uses a limited number of inspections over a larger number of time periods to detect a violation (an illegal act) of an inspectee. Compared with earlier models, we allow varying…
We consider the problem of a decision-maker searching for information on multiple alternatives when information is learned on all alternatives simultaneously. The decision-maker has a running cost of searching for information, and has to…
This paper examines the integration of computational complexity into game theoretic models. The example focused on is the Prisoner's Dilemma, repeated for a finite length of time. We show that a minimal bound on the players' computational…
We study Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) variants of two canonical sequential decision problems: Pandora's box and the prophet inequality. For Pandora's box, the risk-aware problem retains an exact Weitzman-style index solution after a…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
We study a fundamental problem in optimization under uncertainty. There are $n$ boxes; each box $i$ contains a hidden reward $x_i$. Rewards are drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution $\mathcal{D}$. For each box $i$, we see $y_i$, an…
Reinforcement learning can greatly benefit from the use of options as a way of encoding recurring behaviours and to foster exploration. An important open problem is how can an agent autonomously learn useful options when solving particular…
The problem Orienteering asks whether there exists a walk which visits a number of sites without exceeding some fuel budget. In the variant of the problem we consider, the cost of each edge in the walk is dependent on the time we depart one…
Designing a good reward function is essential to robot planning and reinforcement learning, but it can also be challenging and frustrating. The reward needs to work across multiple different environments, and that often requires many…
In recent years much effort has been concentrated towards achieving polynomial time lower bounds on algorithms for solving various well-known problems. A useful technique for showing such lower bounds is to prove them conditionally based on…
We consider a practically motivated variant of the canonical online fair allocation problem: a decision-maker has a budget of perishable resources to allocate over a fixed number of rounds. Each round sees a random number of arrivals, and…