Related papers: Pandora's Box Reopened: Robust Search and Choice O…
It is common to encounter the situation with uncertainty for decision makers (DMs) in dealing with a complex decision making problem. The existing evidence shows that people usually fear the extreme uncertainty named as the unknown. This…
Most exploration algorithms search broadly until uncertainty is resolved. When the action space is too large to resolve within budget, practitioners default to $\varepsilon$-greedy, which bounds disruption but spends its override blindly.…
In sequential search, alternatives are tested until the true class is found. Standard proper scoring rules like log loss are local, ignoring the ranking of competitors and misaligning model evaluation with search utility. We show that…
We consider model selection for sequential decision making in stochastic environments with bandit feedback, where a meta-learner has at its disposal a pool of base learners, and decides on the fly which action to take based on the policies…
In digital health and EdTech, recommendation systems face a significant challenge: users often choose impulsively, in ways that conflict with the platform's long-term payoffs. This misalignment makes it difficult to effectively learn to…
We study a censored variant of the data-driven newsvendor problem, where the decision-maker must select an ordering quantity that minimizes expected overage and underage costs based only on offline censored sales data, rather than…
In delegation problems, a principal does not have the resources necessary to complete a particular task, so they delegate the task to an untrusted agent whose interests may differ from their own. Given any family of such problems and space…
We consider a resource-aware variant of the classical multi-armed bandit problem: In each round, the learner selects an arm and determines a resource limit. It then observes a corresponding (random) reward, provided the (random) amount of…
Most learning algorithms with formal regret guarantees assume that all mistakes are recoverable and essentially rely on trying all possible behaviors. This approach is problematic when some mistakes are "catastrophic", i.e., irreparable. We…
We consider the problem of reward maximization in the dueling bandit setup along with constraints on resource consumption. As in the classic dueling bandits, at each round the learner has to choose a pair of items from a set of $K$ items…
We present a study on a repeated delegated choice problem, which is the first to consider an online learning variant of Kleinberg and Kleinberg, EC'18. In this model, a principal interacts repeatedly with an agent who possesses an exogenous…
The Prophet Inequality and Pandora's Box problems are fundamental stochastic problem with applications in Mechanism Design, Online Algorithms, Stochastic Optimization, Optimal Stopping, and Operations Research. A usual assumption in these…
A decisionmaker faces $n$ alternatives, each of which represents a potential reward. After investing costly resources into investigating the alternatives, the decisionmaker may select one, or more generally a feasible subset, and obtain the…
We study algorithms for average-cost reinforcement learning problems with value function approximation. Our starting point is the recently proposed POLITEX algorithm, a version of policy iteration where the policy produced in each iteration…
Robust optimization is a popular paradigm for modeling and solving two- and multi-stage decision-making problems affected by uncertainty. In many real-world applications, the time of information discovery is decision-dependent and the…
In many sequential decision-making problems, the goal is to optimize a utility function while satisfying a set of constraints on different utilities. This learning problem is formalized through Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs).…
The minmax regret problem for combinatorial optimization under uncertainty can be viewed as a zero-sum game played between an optimizing player and an adversary, where the optimizing player selects a solution and the adversary selects costs…
We revisit the classic Pandora's Box (PB) problem under correlated distributions on the box values. Recent work of arXiv:1911.01632 obtained constant approximate algorithms for a restricted class of policies for the problem that visit boxes…
In many sequential decision problems, an agent performs a repeated task. He then suffers regret and obtains information that he may use in the following rounds. However, sometimes the agent may also obtain information and avoid suffering…
We consider the problem of online resource allocation with average budget constraints. At each time point the decision maker makes an irrevocable decision of whether to accept or reject a request before the next request arrives with the…