Related papers: Scale-free adaptive planning for deterministic dyn…

Reward-free exploration is a reinforcement learning setting studied by Jin et al. (2020), who address it by running several algorithms with regret guarantees in parallel. In our work, we instead give a more natural adaptive approach for…

This paper provides a novel solution to a task allocation problem, by which a group of agents decides on the assignment of a discrete set of tasks in a distributed manner. In this setting, heterogeneous agents have individual preferences…

Path planning, the problem of efficiently discovering high-reward trajectories, often requires optimizing a high-dimensional and multimodal reward function. Popular approaches like CEM and CMA-ES greedily focus on promising regions of the…

Designing autonomous drone swarms is hampered by a vast design space spanning platform, algorithmic, and numerical-strength choices. We perform large-scale agent-based simulations in three canonical scenarios: swarm-on-swarm battle,…

We develop a framework for obtaining polynomial time approximation schemes (PTAS) for a class of stochastic dynamic programs. Using our framework, we obtain the first PTAS for the following stochastic combinatorial optimization problems:…

We study a fundamental stochastic selection problem involving $n$ independent random variables, each of which can be queried at some cost. Given a tolerance level $\delta$, the goal is to find a value that is $\delta$-approximately minimum…

We propose Soft Preference Optimization (SPO), a method for aligning generative models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), with human preferences, without the need for a reward model. SPO optimizes model outputs directly over a…

Lipschitz bandits is a prominent version of multi-armed bandits that studies large, structured action spaces such as the $[0,1]$ interval, where similar actions are guaranteed to have similar rewards. A central theme here is the adaptive…

In continuous-choice settings, consumers decide not only on whether to purchase a product, but also on how much to purchase. Thus, firms optimize a full price schedule rather than a single price point. This paper provides a methodology to…

We formulate and study a fundamental search and detection problem, Schedule Optimization, motivated by a variety of real-world applications, ranging from monitoring content changes on the web, social networks, and user activities to…

We examine perfect information stochastic mean-payoff games - a class of games containing as special sub-classes the usual mean-payoff games and parity games. We show that deterministic memoryless strategies that are optimal for discounted…

We consider the classical problem of sequential resource allocation where a decision maker must repeatedly divide a budget between several resources, each with diminishing returns. This can be recast as a specific stochastic optimization…

We derive a new adaptive leverage score sampling strategy for solving the Column Subset Selection Problem (CSSP). The resulting algorithm, called Adaptive Randomized Pivoting, can be viewed as a randomization of Osinsky's recently proposed…

We consider the problem of assigning or allocating resources to a set of jobs. We consider the case when the resources are fungible, that is, the job can be done with any mix of the resources, but with different efficiencies. In our…

We study Bayesian automated mechanism design in unstructured dynamic environments, where a principal repeatedly interacts with an agent, and takes actions based on the strategic agent's report of the current state of the world. Both the…

Online decision-making can be formulated as the popular stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where a learner makes decisions (or takes actions) to maximize cumulative rewards collected from an unknown environment. This paper proposes to…

Most classical scheduling formulations assume a fixed and known duration for each activity. In this paper, we weaken this assumption, requiring instead that each duration can be represented by an independent random variable with a known…

Reward design in reinforcement learning and optimal control is challenging. Preference-based alignment addresses this by enabling agents to learn rewards from ranked trajectory pairs provided by humans. However, existing methods often…

Planning problems are hard, motion planning, for example, isPSPACE-hard. Such problems are even more difficult in the presence of uncertainty. Although, Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) provide a formal framework for such problems, finding…

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a predominant alignment method for diffusion models, facilitating off-policy training without explicit reward modeling. However, its reliance on large-scale, high-quality human preference…