Related papers: Optimizing over iid distributions and the Beat the…
We consider concurrent games played by two-players on a finite-state graph, where in every round the players simultaneously choose a move, and the current state along with the joint moves determine the successor state. We study a…
Many high-stakes AI deployments proceed only if every stakeholder deems the system acceptable relative to their own minimum standard. With randomization over a finite menu of options, this becomes a feasibility question: does there exist a…
We consider fixed-budget best-arm identification in two-armed Gaussian bandit problems. One of the longstanding open questions is the existence of an optimal strategy under which the probability of misidentification matches a lower bound.…
Consider a coin tossing experiment which consists of tossing one of two coins at a time, according to a renewal process. The first coin is fair and the second has probability $1/2 + \theta$, $\theta \in [-1/2,1/2]$, $\theta$ unknown but…
In mean-payoff games, the objective of the protagonist is to ensure that the limit average of an infinite sequence of numeric weights is nonnegative. In energy games, the objective is to ensure that the running sum of weights is always…
Robust mechanism design is a rising alternative to Bayesian mechanism design, which yields designs that do not rely on assumptions like full distributional knowledge. We apply this approach to mechanisms for selling a single item, assuming…
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…
We study the problem of optimizing the betting frequency in a dynamic game setting using Kelly's celebrated expected logarithmic growth criterion as the performance metric. The game is defined by a sequence of bets with independent and…
Computing the winning set for B{\"u}chi objectives in alternating games on graphs is a central problem in computer aided verification with a large number of applications. The long standing best known upper bound for solving the problem is…
In imperfect information games (e.g. Bridge, Skat, Poker), one of the fundamental considerations is to infer the missing information while at the same time avoiding the disclosure of private information. Disregarding the issue of protecting…
In the influence maximization (IM) problem, we are given a social network and a budget $k$, and we look for a set of $k$ nodes in the network, called seeds, that maximize the expected number of nodes that are reached by an influence cascade…
In this paper, we study the problem of estimating uniformly well the mean values of several distributions given a finite budget of samples. If the variance of the distributions were known, one could design an optimal sampling strategy by…
Consider a card guessing game with complete feedback in which a deck of $n$ cards ordered $1,\dots, n$ is riffle-shuffled once. With the goal to maximize the number of correct guesses, a player guesses cards from the top of the deck one at…
We consider concurrent games played on graphs. At every round of a game, each player simultaneously and independently selects a move; the moves jointly determine the transition to a successor state. Two basic objectives are the safety…
This paper studies competitions with rank-based reward among a large number of teams. Within each sizable team, we consider a mean-field contribution game in which each team member contributes to the jump intensity of a common Poisson…
An average-time game is played on the infinite graph of configurations of a finite timed automaton. The two players, Min and Max, construct an infinite run of the automaton by taking turns to perform a timed transition. Player Min wants to…
We consider a limit theorem for the distribution of a r.v. $Y_n:=argmax {\{X_i, i= 1,..., n\}},$ where $X_i'$s are independent continuous non-negative random variables. The r.v.'s $\{X_i, i=1,..., n\}$, may be interpreted as the gains of…
Can a probabilistic gambler get arbitrarily rich when all deterministic gamblers fail? We study this problem in the context of algorithmic randomness, introducing a new notion -- almost everywhere computable randomness. A binary sequence…
We calculated a fixed strategy that minimizes the average number of guesses (minimum strategy) for the number-guessing game MOO by exhaustive search. Although the minimum strategy for a similar game, mastermind, has been reported, this…
Consider a game where Alice generates an integer and Bob wins if he can factor that integer. Traditional game theory tells us that Bob will always win this game even though in practice Alice will win given our usual assumptions about the…