Related papers: On the Optimality of Discrete Object Naming: a Kin…

Selecting input features of top relevance has become a popular method for building self-explaining models. In this work, we extend this selective rationalization approach to text matching, where the goal is to jointly select and align text…

We study optimal information provision in transportation networks when users are strategic and the network state is uncertain. An omniscient planner observes the network state and discloses information to the users with the goal of…

Resource-constrained systems are prevalent in communications. Such a system is composed of many components but only some of them can be allocated with resources such as time slots. According to the amount of information about the system,…

In this paper, we discuss a stochastic decision problem of optimally selecting the order in which to try $n$ opportunities that may yield an uncertain reward in the future. The motivation came out from pure curiosity, after an informal…

Deception is a technique to mislead human or computer systems by manipulating beliefs and information. Successful deception is characterized by the information-asymmetric, dynamic, and strategic behaviors of the deceiver and the deceivee.…

This paper describes a method to enrich lexical resources with content relating to linguistic diversity, based on knowledge from the field of lexical typology. We capture the phenomenon of diversity through the notions of lexical gap and…

We identify fundamental issues with discretization when estimating information-theoretic quantities in the analysis of data. These difficulties are theoretical in nature and arise with discrete datasets carrying significant implications for…

We develop a worst-case analysis of aggregation of classifier ensembles for binary classification. The task of predicting to minimize error is formulated as a game played over a given set of unlabeled data (a transductive setting), where…

A key property of linguistic conventions is that they hold over an entire community of speakers, allowing us to communicate efficiently even with people we have never met before. At the same time, much of our language use is…

Signaling is an important topic in the study of asymmetric information in economic settings. In particular, the transparency of information available to a seller in an auction setting is a question of major interest. We introduce the study…

We consider information filtering, in which we face a stream of items too voluminous to process by hand (e.g., scientific articles, blog posts, emails), and must rely on a computer system to automatically filter out irrelevant items. Such…

Information foraging connects optimal foraging theory in ecology with how humans search for information. The theory suggests that, following an information scent, the information seeker must optimize the tradeoff between exploration by…

Several scenarios require the optimization of non-convex black-box functions, that are noisy expensive to evaluate functions with unknown analytical expression, whose gradients are hence not accessible. For example, the hyper-parameter…

The lack of reliable, personalized information often complicates sexual violence survivors' support-seeking. Recently, there is an emerging approach to conversational information systems for support-seeking of sexual violence survivors,…

We study the potential for interaction in natural language classification. We add a limited form of interaction for intent classification, where users provide an initial query using natural language, and the system asks for additional…

The design of metaprogramming languages requires appreciation of the tradeoffs that exist between important language characteristics such as safety properties, expressive power, and succinctness. Unfortunately, such tradeoffs are little…

We consider Bayesian optimization of an expensive-to-evaluate black-box objective function, where we also have access to cheaper approximations of the objective. In general, such approximations arise in applications such as reinforcement…

Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…

We introduce the problem of communication with partial information, where there is an asymmetry between the transmitter and the receiver codebooks. Practical applications of the proposed setup include the robust signal hashing problem…

The exploration of whether agents can align with their environment without relying on human-labeled data presents an intriguing research topic. Drawing inspiration from the alignment process observed in intelligent organisms, where…