Related papers: Towards Direct Evaluation of Harness Optimizers vi…
Harness engineering has emerged as an important inference-time technique for large language model (LLM) agents, aiming to improve long-term performance through task decomposition and guided execution. However, more elaborate harnesses are…
Human decision-makers often face choices about complex cases with many potentially relevant features, but limited bandwidth to inspect and integrate all available information. In such settings, we study algorithms that highlight a small…
Motivated by applications such as college admission and insurance rate determination, we propose an evaluation problem where the inputs are controlled by strategic individuals who can modify their features at a cost. A learner can only…
The last decade has seen a revolution in the theory and application of machine learning and pattern recognition. Through these advancements, variable ranking has emerged as an active and growing research area and it is now beginning to be…
In the past few years, there has been much work on incorporating fairness requirements into algorithmic rankers, with contributions coming from the data management, algorithms, information retrieval, and recommender systems communities. In…
Feature-based algorithm selection aims to automatically find the best one from a portfolio of optimization algorithms on an unseen problem based on its landscape features. Feature-based algorithm selection has recently received attention in…
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become central to aligning large language models with human values, typically by first learning a reward model from preference data which is then used to update the model with…
Traditional query optimizers are designed to be fast and stateless: each query is quickly optimized using approximate statistics, sent off to the execution engine, and promptly forgotten. Recent work on learned query optimization have shown…
Ranking and scoring are ubiquitous. We consider the setting in which an institution, called a ranker, evaluates a set of individuals based on demographic, behavioral or other characteristics. The final output is a ranking that represents…
Stochastic optimization algorithms have been successfully applied in several domains to find optimal solutions. Because of the ever-growing complexity of the integrated systems, novel stochastic algorithms are being proposed, which makes…
Feature selection aims to select a subset of features to optimize the performances of downstream predictive tasks. Recently, multi-agent reinforced feature selection (MARFS) has been introduced to automate feature selection, by creating…
Software requirements prioritization plays a crucial role in software development. It can be viewed as the process of ordering requirements by determining which requirements must be done first and which can be done later. Powerful…
Modern recommendation systems rely on the wisdom of the crowd to learn the optimal course of action. This induces an inherent mis-alignment of incentives between the system's objective to learn (explore) and the individual users' objective…
Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…
Optimization algorithms can be interpreted through the lens of dynamical systems as the interconnection of linear systems and a set of subgradient nonlinearities. This dynamical systems formulation allows for the analysis and synthesis of…
Ranking models are typically designed to provide rankings that optimize some measure of immediate utility to the users. As a result, they have been unable to anticipate an increasing number of undesirable long-term consequences of their…
We present a physically-inspired model and an efficient algorithm to infer hierarchical rankings of nodes in directed networks. It assigns real-valued ranks to nodes rather than simply ordinal ranks, and it formalizes the assumption that…
Most people struggle with prioritizing work. While inexact heuristics have been developed over time, there is still no tractable principled algorithm for deciding which of the many possible tasks one should tackle in any given day, month,…
The optimization algorithm and its hyperparameters can significantly affect the training speed and resulting model accuracy in machine learning applications. The wish list for an ideal optimizer includes fast and smooth convergence to low…
Optimization problems with set-valued objective functions arise in contexts such as multi-stage optimization with vector-valued objectives. The aim is to identify an optimizer -- a feasible point with an optimal objective value -- based on…