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When globally optimal solutions of complicated optimization problems cannot be located by evolutionary algorithms (EAs) in polynomial expected running time, the hitting time/running time analysis is not flexible enough to accommodate the…
In imitation learning for planning, parameters of heuristic functions are optimized against a set of solved problem instances. This work revisits the necessary and sufficient conditions of strictly optimally efficient heuristics for forward…
We provide a novel computer-assisted technique for systematically analyzing first-order methods for optimization. In contrast with previous works, the approach is particularly suited for handling sublinear convergence rates and stochastic…
We study social welfare in one-sided matching markets where the goal is to efficiently allocate n items to n agents that each have a complete, private preference list and a unit demand over the items. Our focus is on allocation mechanisms…
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a natural and general model in reinforcement learning that take into account the agent's uncertainty about its current state. In the literature on POMDPs, it is customary to assume…
A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…
Search algorithms are often categorized by their node expansion strategy. One option is the depth-first strategy, a simple backtracking strategy that traverses the search space in the order in which successor nodes are generated. An…
Motivated by applications where impatience is pervasive and evaluation times are uncertain, we study a selection model where options may expire at an unknown point in time and evaluation times are stochastic. Initially, the decision-maker…
This paper compares two leading approaches for robust optimization in the models of online algorithms and mechanism design. Competitive analysis compares the performance of an online algorithm to an offline benchmark in worst-case over…
We consider the problem of optimally utilizing $N$ resources, each in an unknown binary state. The state of each resource can be inferred from state-dependent noisy measurements. Depending on its state, utilizing a resource results in…
In this paper, we study a stochastic variant of the celebrated k-server problem. In the k-server problem, we are required to minimize the total movement of k servers that are serving an online sequence of t requests in a metric. In the…
Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) is a structured approach for optimizing tasks with multiple objectives. However, it often relies on pre-defined reward functions, which can be hard to design for balancing conflicting goals and…
In this paper, we provide a new algorithm for the problem of prediction in Reinforcement Learning, \emph{i.e.}, estimating the Value Function of a Markov Reward Process (MRP) using the linear function approximation architecture, with memory…
We consider the bandit problem of selecting $K$ out of $N$ arms at each time step. The reward can be a non-linear function of the rewards of the selected individual arms. The direct use of a multi-armed bandit algorithm requires choosing…
We revisit offline reinforcement learning on episodic time-homogeneous Markov Decision Processes (MDP). For tabular MDP with $S$ states and $A$ actions, or linear MDP with anchor points and feature dimension $d$, given the collected $K$…
We consider the problem of planning with participation constraints introduced in [Zhang et al., 2022]. In this problem, a principal chooses actions in a Markov decision process, resulting in separate utilities for the principal and the…
We consider a sequential decision-making problem where an agent can take one action at a time and each action has a stochastic temporal extent, i.e., a new action cannot be taken until the previous one is finished. Upon completion, the…
This paper considers online optimization for a system that performs a sequence of back-to-back tasks. Each task can be processed in one of multiple processing modes that affect the duration of the task, the reward earned, and an additional…
The (R, s, S) is a stochastic inventory control policy widely used by practitioners. In an inventory system managed according to this policy, the inventory is reviewed at instant R; if the observed inventory position is lower than the…
Specifying reward functions for complex tasks like object manipulation or driving is challenging to do by hand. Reward learning seeks to address this by learning a reward model using human feedback on selected query policies. This shifts…