Related papers: Simpler Than You Think: The Practical Dynamics of …
This paper discusses distributed approaches for the solution of random convex programs (RCP). RCPs are convex optimization problems with a (usually large) number N of randomly extracted constraints; they arise in several applicative areas,…
The computational study of elections generally assumes that the preferences of the electorate come in as a list of votes. Depending on the context, it may be much more natural to represent the list succinctly, as the distinct votes of the…
Training a robust policy is critical for policy deployment in real-world systems or dealing with unknown dynamics mismatch in different dynamic systems. Domain Randomization~(DR) is a simple and elegant approach that trains a conservative…
Recent advances in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) show that large language models enhance their reasoning abilities when trained with verifiable signals. However, due to reward sparsity, effectiveness depends heavily…
Liquid democracy is a novel paradigm for collective decision-making that gives agents the choice between casting a direct vote or delegating their vote to another agent. We consider a generalization of the standard liquid democracy setting…
Much research in electoral control -- one of the most studied form of electoral attacks, in which an entity running an election alters the structure of that election to yield a preferred outcome -- has focused on giving decision complexity…
A core tension in the study of plurality elections is the clash between the classic Hotelling-Downs model, which predicts that two office-seeking candidates should position themselves at the median voter's policy, and the empirical…
Elections are the central institution of democratic processes, and often the elected body -- in either public or private governance -- is a committee of individuals. To ensure the legitimacy of elected bodies, the electoral processes should…
Limited Voting (LV) is an approval-based method for multi-winner elections where all ballots are required to have a same fixed size. While it appears to be used as voting method in corporate governance and has some political applications,…
Elections and opinion polls often have many candidates, with the aim to either rank the candidates or identify a small set of winners according to voters' preferences. In practice, voters do not provide a full ranking; instead, each voter…
Successive elimination of candidates is often a route to making manipulation intractable to compute. We prove that eliminating candidates does not necessarily increase the computational complexity of manipulation. However, for many voting…
We introduce the reputational voter model (RVM) to account for the time-varying abilities of individuals to influence their neighbors. To understand of the RVM, we first discuss the fitness voter model (FVM), in which each voter has a fixed…
The August 2022 Alaska Special Election for US House contained many interesting features from the perspective of social choice theory. This election used instant runoff voting (often referred to as ranked choice voting) to elect a winner,…
In an election where $n$ voters rank $m$ candidates, a Condorcet winning set is a committee of $k$ candidates such that for any outside candidate, a majority of voters prefer some committee member. Condorcet's paradox shows that some…
Ranking data arises in a wide variety of application areas but remains difficult to model, learn from, and predict. Datasets often exhibit multimodality, intransitivity, or incomplete rankings---particularly when generated by humans---yet…
This study explores the relationship between voter trust and their experiences during elections by applying a rule-based data mining technique to the 2022 Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE). Using the Apriori algorithm…
Fairness in multiwinner elections, a growing line of research in computational social choice, primarily concerns the use of constraints to ensure fairness. Recent work proposed a model to find a diverse \emph{and} representative committee…
We study the parameterized complexity of winner determination problems for three prevalent $k$-committee selection rules, namely the minimax approval voting (MAV), the proportional approval voting (PAV), and the Chamberlin-Courant's…
We study the behavior of Range Voting and Normalized Range Voting with respect to electoral control. Electoral control encompasses attempts from an election chair to alter the structure of an election in order to change the outcome. We show…
Policies trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) are often needlessly complex, making them difficult to analyse and interpret. In a run with $n$ time steps, a policy will make $n$ decisions on actions to take; we conjecture that only a…