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We study a Bayesian contract design problem in which a principal interacts with an unknown agent. We consider the single-parameter uncertainty model introduced by Alon et al. [2021], in which the agent's type is described by a single…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli

This work studies the online contract design problem. The principal's goal is to learn the optimal contract that maximizes her utility through repeated interactions, without prior knowledge of the agent's type (i.e., the agent's cost and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Shiliang Zuo

We give a general unified method that can be used for $L_1$ {\em closeness testing} of a wide range of univariate structured distribution families. More specifically, we design a sample optimal and computationally efficient algorithm for…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-08-25 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Vladimir Nikishkin

When machine learning is outsourced to a rational agent, conflicts of interest might arise and severely impact predictive performance. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for incentive-aware delegation of machine learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Eden Saig , Inbal Talgam-Cohen , Nir Rosenfeld

This paper studies an approximation method for the log-likelihood function of a nonlinear diffusion process using the bridge of the diffusion. The main result (Theorem \refthm:approx) shows that this approximation converges uniformly to the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-01-11 Aleksandar Mijatović , Paul Schneider

We consider the optimal value of information (VoI) problem, where the goal is to sequentially select a set of tests with a minimal cost, so that one can efficiently make the best decision based on the observed outcomes. Existing algorithms…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-07-18 Yuxin Chen , Jean-Michel Renders , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani , Andreas Krause

For many tasks of data analysis, we may only have the information of the explanatory variable and the evaluation of the response values are quite expensive. While it is impractical or too costly to obtain the responses of all units, a…

Computation · Statistics 2023-04-07 Wei Zheng , Ting Tian , Xueqin Wang

This study investigates the development of an optimal execution strategy through reinforcement learning, aiming to determine the most effective approach for traders to buy and sell inventory within a finite time horizon. Our proposed model…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2025-11-04 Yadh Hafsi , Edoardo Vittori

In an online contract selection problem there is a seller which offers a set of contracts to sequentially arriving buyers whose types are drawn from an unknown distribution. If there exists a profitable contract for the buyer in the offered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-05-16 Cem Tekin , Mingyan Liu

We consider the problem of sampling an edge almost uniformly from an unknown graph, $G = (V, E)$. Access to the graph is provided via queries of the following types: (1) uniform vertex queries, (2) degree queries, and (3) neighbor queries.…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2017-06-30 Talya Eden , Will Rosenbaum

We consider a model where an agent has a repeated decision to make and wishes to maximize their total payoff. Payoffs are influenced by an action taken by the agent, but also an unknown state of the world that evolves over time. Before…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-01-20 Nicole Immorlica , Ian Kash , Brendan Lucier

We study an online resource allocation problem under uncertainty about demand and about the reward of each type of demand (agents) for the resource. Even though dealing with demand uncertainty in resource allocation problems has been the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Negin Gorlezaei , Patrick Jaillet , Zijie Zhou

This paper proposes near-optimal algorithms for the pure-exploration linear bandit problem in the fixed confidence and fixed budget settings. Leveraging ideas from the theory of suprema of empirical processes, we provide an algorithm whose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Julian Katz-Samuels , Lalit Jain , Zohar Karnin , Kevin Jamieson

The problem of computing near-optimal contracts in combinatorial settings has recently attracted significant interest in the computer science community. Previous work has provided a rich body of structural and algorithmic insights into this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Michal Feldman , Yoav Gal-Tzur , Tomasz Ponitka , Maya Schlesinger

The predictive quality of machine learning models is typically measured in terms of their (approximate) expected prediction error or the so-called Area Under the Curve (AUC) for a particular data distribution. However, when the models are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-08 Hiva Ghanbari , Katya Scheinberg

Structural equation models (SEMs) are widely used in sciences, ranging from economics to psychology, to uncover causal relationships underlying a complex system under consideration and estimate structural parameters of interest. We study…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-21 Luofeng Liao , You-Lin Chen , Zhuoran Yang , Bo Dai , Zhaoran Wang , Mladen Kolar

We study the sample complexity of obtaining an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in \emph{Robust} discounted Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs), given only access to a generative model of the nominal kernel. This problem is widely studied in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Pierre Clavier , Erwan Le Pennec , Matthieu Geist

We study the tradeoff between sample complexity and round complexity in on-demand sampling, where the learning algorithm adaptively samples from $k$ distributions over a limited number of rounds. In the realizable setting of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Nika Haghtalab , Omar Montasser , Mingda Qiao

The maximum utility estimation proposed by Elliott and Lieli (2013) can be viewed as cost-sensitive binary classification; thus, its in-sample overfitting issue is similar to that of perceptron learning. A utility-maximizing prediction rule…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-09-29 Jiun-Hua Su

Many real-life contractual relations differ completely from the clean, static model at the heart of principal-agent theory. Typically, they involve repeated strategic interactions of the principal and agent, taking place under uncertainty…