Related papers: The Case for Cardinality Lower Bounds
Modern systems, such as digital platforms and service systems, increasingly rely on contextual bandits for online decision-making; however, their deployment can inadvertently create unfair exposure among arms, undermining long-term platform…
The branch-and-bound algorithm based on decision diagrams introduced by Bergman et al. in 2016 is a framework for solving discrete optimization problems with a dynamic programming formulation. It works by compiling a series of bounded-width…
The linear submodular bandit problem was proposed to simultaneously address diversified retrieval and online learning in a recommender system. If there is no uncertainty, this problem is equivalent to a submodular maximization problem under…
Automatic bacterial colony counting is a highly sought-after technology in modern biological laboratories because it eliminates manual counting effort. Previous work has observed that MicrobiaNet, currently the best-performing cardinality…
Modern computer systems are highly configurable, with the total variability space sometimes larger than the number of atoms in the universe. Understanding and reasoning about the performance behavior of highly configurable systems, over a…
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) is arguably the most commonly used method for linear multi-arm bandit problems. While conceptually and computationally simple, this method highly relies on the confidence bounds, failing to strike the optimal…
A common theme in factorised databases and knowledge compilation is the representation of solution sets in a useful yet succinct data structure. In this paper, we study the representation of the result of join queries (or, equivalently, the…
This paper investigates the challenges of optimal online policy learning under missing data. State-of-the-art algorithms implicitly assume that rewards are always observable. I show that when rewards are missing at random, the Upper…
Bayesian optimization is a framework for global search via maximum a posteriori updates rather than simulated annealing, and has gained prominence for decision-making under uncertainty. In this work, we cast Bayesian optimization as a…
In several online prediction problems of recent interest the comparison class is composed of matrices with bounded entries. For example, in the online max-cut problem, the comparison class is matrices which represent cuts of a given graph…
We study differentially-private statistics in the fully dynamic continual observation model, where many updates can arrive at each time step and updates to a stream can involve both insertions and deletions of an item. Earlier work (e.g.,…
Belief tracking is a basic problem in planning with sensing. While the problem is intractable, it has been recently shown that for both deterministic and non-deterministic systems expressed in compact form, it can be done in time and space…
Networks are integral parts of modern safety-critical systems and certification demands the provision of guarantees for data transmissions. Deterministic Network Calculus (DNC) can compute a worst-case bound on a data flow's end-to-end…
This paper studies lower bounds for fundamental optimization problems in the CONGEST model. We show that solving problems exactly in this model can be a hard task, by providing $\tilde{\Omega}(n^2)$ lower bounds for cornerstone problems,…
This paper is motivated by recent research in the $d$-dimensional stochastic linear bandit literature, which has revealed an unsettling discrepancy: algorithms like Thompson sampling and Greedy demonstrate promising empirical performance,…
Probabilities of causation are fundamental to individual-level explanation and decision making, yet they are inherently counterfactual and not point-identifiable from data in general. Existing bounds either disregard available covariates,…
Providing explanations about how machine learning algorithms work and/or make particular predictions is one of the main tools that can be used to improve their trusworthiness, fairness and robustness. Among the most intuitive type of…
Prediction accuracy and model explainability are the two most important objectives when developing machine learning algorithms to solve real-world problems. The neural networks are known to possess good prediction performance, but lack of…
We consider the problem of estimating the support size of a distribution $D$. Our investigations are pursued through the lens of distribution testing and seek to understand the power of conditional sampling (denoted as COND), wherein one is…
This paper proves strong lower bounds for distributed computing in the CONGEST model, by presenting the bit-gadget: a new technique for constructing graphs with small cuts. The contribution of bit-gadgets is twofold. First, developing…