Related papers: Maximizing the Margin between Desirable and Undesi…

Many information systems use tags and keywords to describe and annotate content. These allow for efficient organization and categorization of items, as well as facilitate relevant search queries. As such, the selected set of tags for an…

This paper studies the sample complexity (aka number of comparisons) bounds for the active best-$k$ items selection from pairwise comparisons. From a given set of items, the learner can make pairwise comparisons on every pair of items, and…

The general problem of robust optimization is this: one of several possible scenarios will appear tomorrow, but things are more expensive tomorrow than they are today. What should you anticipatorily buy today, so that the worst-case cost…

Robotic planning in real-world scenarios typically requires joint optimization of logic and continuous variables. A core challenge to combine the strengths of logic planners and continuous solvers is the design of an efficient interface…

We present an efficient task and motion replanning approach for sequential multi-object manipulation in dynamic environments. Conventional Task And Motion Planning (TAMP) solvers experience an exponential increase in planning time as the…

We study the parameterized complexity of interdiction problems in graphs. For an optimization problem on graphs, one can formulate an interdiction problem as a game consisting of two players, namely, an interdictor and an evader, who…

Column-sparse packing problems arise in several contexts in both deterministic and stochastic discrete optimization. We present two unifying ideas, (non-uniform) attenuation and multiple-chance algorithms, to obtain improved approximation…

This paper presents new results for the (partial) maximum a posteriori (MAP) problem in Bayesian networks, which is the problem of querying the most probable state configuration of some of the network variables given evidence. First, it is…

In this paper we consider a generalization of the well-known budgeted maximum coverage problem. We are given a ground set of elements and a set of bins. The goal is to find a subset of elements along with an associated set of bins, such…

We consider manipulation problems in constrained and cluttered settings, which require several regrasps at unknown locations. We propose to inform an optimization-based task and motion planning (TAMP) solver with possible regrasp areas and…

Motivated by modern-day applications such as Attended Home Delivery and Preference-based Group Scheduling, where decision makers wish to steer a large number of customers toward choosing the exact same alternative, we introduce a novel…

Inspired by traditional handmade crafts, where a person improvises assemblies based on the available objects, we formally introduce the Craft Assembly Task. It is a robotic assembly task that involves building an accurate representation of…

We introduce the Block Rearrangement Problem (BRaP), a challenging component of large warehouse management which involves rearranging storage blocks within dense grids to achieve a goal state. We formally define the BRaP as a graph search…

This paper presents a new combinatorial optimisation task, the Subset Sum Matching Problem (SSMP), which is an abstraction of common financial applications such as trades reconciliation. We present three algorithms, two suboptimal and one…

Iterative rounding has enjoyed tremendous success in elegantly resolving open questions regarding the approximability of problems dominated by covering constraints. Although iterative rounding methods have been applied to packing problems,…

A central problem in business concerns the optimal allocation of limited resources to a set of available tasks, where the payoff of these tasks is inherently uncertain. In credit card fraud detection, for instance, a bank can only assign a…

In this paper, we study a number of well-known combinatorial optimization problems that fit in the following paradigm: the input is a collection of (potentially inconsistent) local relationships between the elements of a ground set (e.g.,…

Time-Optimal Path Parameterization (TOPP) is a well-studied problem in robotics and has a wide range of applications. There are two main families of methods to address TOPP: Numerical Integration (NI) and Convex Optimization (CO). NI-based…

We consider a discrete-time bipartite matching model with random arrivals of units of supply and demand that can wait in queues located at the nodes in the network. A control policy determines which are matched at each time. The focus is on…

We develop a novel mathematical programming approximation framework to tackle the stochastic knapsack problem. In this problem, the decision maker considers items for which either weights or values, or both, are random. The aim is to select…