Related papers: Robust Competitive Ratio for Deterministic Monopol…
In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on…
We study control of constrained linear systems with only partial statistical information about the uncertainty affecting the system dynamics and the sensor measurements. Specifically, given a finite collection of disturbance realizations…
In multi-item screening, optimal selling mechanisms are challenging to characterize and implement, even with full knowledge of valuation distributions. In this paper, we aim to develop tractable, interpretable, and implementable mechanisms…
Reinforcement learning (RL) policies often fail under dynamics that differ from training, a gap not fully addressed by domain randomization or existing adversarial RL methods. Distributionally robust RL provides a formal remedy but still…
Assortment optimization is a fundamental challenge in modern retail and recommendation systems, where the goal is to select a subset of products that maximizes expected revenue under complex customer choice behaviors. While recent advances…
Demand response (DR) has been demonstrated to be an effective method for reducing peak load and mitigating uncertainties on both the supply and demand sides of the electricity market. One critical question for DR research is how to…
In this study, we apply reinforcement learning techniques and propose what we call reinforcement mechanism design to tackle the dynamic pricing problem in sponsored search auctions. In contrast to previous game-theoretical approaches that…
This study reveals the inherent tolerance of contrastive learning (CL) towards sampling bias, wherein negative samples may encompass similar semantics (\eg labels). However, existing theories fall short in providing explanations for this…
A central goal of machine learning is to learn robust representations that capture the causal relationship between inputs features and output labels. However, minimizing empirical risk over finite or biased datasets often results in models…
This paper revisits the classic instrument choice problem in a setting with consumption externalities, through the lens of robust mechanism design. A regulator can implement any incentive-compatible policy but is uncertain about how…
This paper investigates the joint optimization of condition-based maintenance and spare provisioning, incorporating insights obtained from sensor data. Prognostic models estimate components' remaining lifetime distributions (RLDs), which…
Pricing decisions stand out as one of the most critical tasks a company faces, particularly in today's digital economy. As with other business decision-making problems, pricing unfolds in a highly competitive and uncertain environment.…
A seller chooses a reserve price in a second-price auction to maximize worst-case expected revenue when she knows only the mean of value distribution and an upper bound on either values themselves or variance. Values are private and iid.…
In performative stochastic optimization, decisions can influence the distribution of random parameters, rendering the data-generating process itself decision-dependent. In practice, decision-makers rarely have access to the true…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) has enabled to prove the equivalence between robustness and regularization in classification and regression, thus providing an analytical reason why regularization generalizes well in statistical…
Distributionally robust optimal control (DROC) is gaining interest. This study presents a reformulation method for discrete DROC (DDROC) problems to design optimal control policies under a worst-case distributional uncertainty. The…
This paper studies Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO), a fundamental framework for enhancing the robustness and generalization of statistical learning and optimization. An effective ambiguity set for DRO must involve distributions…
We study two-stage distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems with decision-dependent information discovery (DDID) wherein (a portion of) the uncertain parameters are revealed only if an (often costly) investment is made in the…
A monopoly platform sells either a risky product (with unknown utility) or a safe product (with known utility) to agents who sequentially arrive and learn the utility of the risky product by the reporting of previous agents. It is costly…