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Searching for objects amongst clutter is a key ability of visual systems. Speed and accuracy are often crucial: how can the visual system trade off these competing quantities for optimal performance in different tasks? How does the…
This paper studies the evaluation of policies that recommend an ordered set of items (e.g., a ranking) based on some context---a common scenario in web search, ads, and recommendation. We build on techniques from combinatorial bandits to…
We model search in settings where decision makers know what can be found but not where to find it. A searcher faces a set of choices arranged by an observable attribute. Each period, she either selects a choice and pays a cost to learn…
We study generalizations of online bipartite matching in which each arriving vertex (customer) views a ranked list of offline vertices (products) and matches to (purchases) the first one they deem acceptable. The number of products that the…
We introduce a non-parametric hierarchical Bayesian approach for open-ended 3D object categorization, named the Local Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (Local-HDP). This method allows an agent to learn independent topics for each category…
We consider adaptive decision-making problems where an agent optimizes a cumulative performance objective by repeatedly choosing among a finite set of options. Compared to the classical prediction-with-expert-advice set-up, we consider…
We consider a setting where $n$ buyers, with combinatorial preferences over $m$ items, and a seller, running a priority-based allocation mechanism, repeatedly interact. Our goal, from observing limited information about the results of these…
When an object detector is deployed in a novel setting it often experiences a drop in performance. This paper studies how an embodied agent can automatically fine-tune a pre-existing object detector while exploring and acquiring images in a…
Recommendation systems capable of providing diverse sets of results are a focus of increasing importance, with motivations ranging from fairness to novelty and other aspects of optimizing user experience. One form of diversity of recent…
We study adaptive mesh selection for the solution of systems of initial value problems. The goal is a rigorous theoretical analysis of potential advantages of adaption. For an optimal method in the sense of the speed of convergence, we…
Reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy by interaction with an environment. Consequently, learning complex behavior requires a vast number of samples, which can be prohibitive in practice. Nevertheless, instead of…
We study \emph{combinatorial procurement auctions}, where a buyer with a valuation function $v$ and budget $B$ wishes to buy a set of items. Each item $i$ has a cost $c_i$ and the buyer is interested in a set $S$ that maximizes $v(S)$…
We examine the problem of smoothed online optimization, where a decision maker must sequentially choose points in a normed vector space to minimize the sum of per-round, non-convex hitting costs and the costs of switching decisions between…
Selection problems with costly information, dating back to Weitzman's Pandora's Box problem, have received much attention recently. We study the general model of Costly Information Combinatorial Selection (CICS) that was recently introduced…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a natural model for planning problems where effects of actions are nondeterministic and the state of the world is not completely observable. It is difficult to solve POMDPs…
Multidimensional optimization problems where the objective function and the constraints are multiextremal non-differentiable Lipschitz functions (with unknown Lipschitz constants) and the feasible region is a finite collection of robust…
Algorithms for learning decision trees often include heuristic local-search operations such as (1) adjusting the threshold of a cut or (2) also exchanging the feature of that cut. We study minimizing the number of classification errors by…
We consider assortment and inventory planning problems with dynamic stockout-based substitution effects, and without replenishment, in two different settings: (1) Customers can see all available products when they arrive, a typical scenario…
We study problems with stochastic uncertainty information on intervals for which the precise value can be queried by paying a cost. The goal is to devise an adaptive decision tree to find a correct solution to the problem in consideration…
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…