Related papers: When Switching Algorithms Helps: A Theoretical Stu…
We consider the problem of selecting $k$ seed nodes in a network to maximize the minimum probability of activation under an independent cascade beginning at these seeds. The motivation is to promote fairness by ensuring that even the least…
We introduce and study online conversion with switching costs, a family of online problems that capture emerging problems at the intersection of energy and sustainability. In this problem, an online player attempts to purchase…
We study unbiased $(1+1)$ evolutionary algorithms on linear functions with an unknown number $n$ of bits with non-zero weight. Static algorithms achieve an optimal runtime of $O(n (\ln n)^{2+\epsilon})$, however, it remained unclear whether…
We study online boosting, the task of converting any weak online learner into a strong online learner. Based on a novel and natural definition of weak online learnability, we develop two online boosting algorithms. The first algorithm is an…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have found many successful real-world applications, where the optimization problems are often subject to a wide range of uncertainties. To understand the practical behaviors of EAs theoretically, there are a…
Algorithms with predictions is a recent framework that has been used to overcome pessimistic worst-case bounds in incomplete information settings. In the context of scheduling, very recent work has leveraged machine-learned predictions to…
Mutation is one of the most important stages of the genetic algorithm because of its impact on the exploration of global optima, and to overcome premature convergence. There are many types of mutation, and the problem lies in selection of…
One approach for reducing run time and improving efficiency of machine learning is to reduce the convergence rate of the optimization algorithm used. Shuffling is an algorithm technique that is widely used in machine learning, but it only…
In this paper, we investigate the power of online learning in stochastic network optimization with unknown system statistics {\it a priori}. We are interested in understanding how information and learning can be efficiently incorporated…
One hope when using non-elitism in evolutionary computation is that the ability to abandon the current-best solution aids leaving local optima. To improve our understanding of this mechanism, we perform a rigorous runtime analysis of a…
Motivated by applications in digital health, this work studies the novel problem of online uniform sampling (OUS), where the goal is to distribute a sampling budget uniformly across unknown decision times. In the OUS problem, the algorithm…
We revisit the well-known online traveling salesman problem (OLTSP) and its extension, the online dial-a-ride problem (OLDARP). A server starting at a designated origin in a metric space, is required to serve online requests, and return to…
Following a line of work that takes advantage of vast machine-learned data to enhance online algorithms with (possibly erroneous) information about future inputs, we consider predictions in the context of deterministic algorithms for the…
We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments. The method is straightforward to implement, is computationally efficient, has…
In the online multiple knapsack problem, an algorithm faces a stream of items, and each item has to be either rejected or stored irrevocably in one of $n$ bins (knapsacks) of equal size. The gain of an~algorithm is equal to the sum of sizes…
In a seminal paper in 2013, Witt showed that the (1+1) Evolutionary Algorithm with standard bit mutation needs time $(1+o(1))n \ln n/p_1$ to find the optimum of any linear function, as long as the probability $p_1$ to flip exactly one bit…
Oversampled adaptive sensing (OAS) is a Bayesian framework recently proposed for effective sensing of structured signals in a time-limited setting. In contrast to the conventional blind oversampling, OAS uses the prior information on the…
Choosing a suitable algorithm from the myriads of different search heuristics is difficult when faced with a novel optimization problem. In this work, we argue that the purely academic question of what could be the best possible algorithm…
The ``fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm'', a.k.a. FISTA, is one of the most widely used algorithms in the literature. However, despite its optimal theoretical $O(1/k^2)$ convergence rate guarantee, oftentimes in practice its…
In many sequential decision making applications, the change of decision would bring an additional cost, such as the wear-and-tear cost associated with changing server status. To control the switching cost, we introduce the problem of online…