Related papers: Total-Order and Partial-Order Planning: A Comparat…
Order is one of the main instruments to measure the relationship between objects in (empirical) data. However, compared to methods that use numerical properties of objects, the amount of ordinal methods developed is rather small. One reason…
We consider a parallel system of $m$ identical machines prone to unpredictable crashes and restarts, trying to cope with the continuous arrival of tasks to be executed. Tasks have different computational requirements (i.e., processing time…
This paper introduces a framework for Planning while Learning where an agent is given a goal to achieve in an environment whose behavior is only partially known to the agent. We discuss the tractability of various plan-design processes. We…
Partial orders may be used for modeling and summarising ranking data when the underlying order relations are less strict than a total order. They are a natural choice when the data are lists recording individuals' positions in queues in…
Developing CPU scheduling algorithms and understanding their impact in practice can be difficult and time consuming due to the need to modify and test operating system kernel code and measure the resulting performance on a consistent…
One of the most ubiquitous problems in optimization is that of finding all the elements of a finite set at which a function $f$ attains its minimum (or maximum). When the codomain of $f$ is equipped with a total order, it is easy to…
Linearizability is the commonly accepted notion of correctness for concurrent data structures. It requires that any execution of the data structure is justified by a linearization --- a linear order on operations satisfying the data…
Many applications, e.g., Web service composition, complex system design, team formation, etc., rely on methods for identifying collections of objects or entities satisfying some functional requirement. Among the collections that satisfy the…
Decision making under uncertainty is at the heart of any autonomous system acting with imperfect information. The cost of solving the decision making problem is exponential in the action and observation spaces, thus rendering it unfeasible…
When allocating indivisible objects via lottery, planners often use ordinal mechanisms, which elicit agents' rankings of objects rather than their full preferences over lotteries. In such an ordinal informational environment, planners…
In many applications, e.g., recommender systems and traffic monitoring, the data comes in the form of a matrix that is only partially observed and low rank. A fundamental data-analysis task for these datasets is matrix completion, where the…
Analyzing big data in a highly dynamic environment becomes more and more critical because of the increasingly need for end-to-end processing of this data. Modern data flows are quite complex and there are not efficient, cost-based,…
We consider the problem of sorting $n$ items, given the outcomes of $m$ pre-existing comparisons. We present a simple and natural deterministic algorithm that runs in $O(m + \log T)$ time and does $O(\log T)$ comparisons, where $T$ is the…
The early classifications of the computational complexity of planning under various restrictions in STRIPS (Bylander) and SAS+ (Baeckstroem and Nebel) have influenced following research in planning in many ways. We go back and reanalyse…
For two causal structures with the same set of visible variables, one is said to observationally dominate the other if the set of distributions over the visible variables realizable by the first contains the set of distributions over the…
Though competitive analysis has been a very useful performance measure for the quality of online algorithms, it is recognized that it sometimes fails to distinguish between algorithms of different quality in practice. A number of…
The goal of partial-order methods is to accelerate the exploration of concurrent systems by examining only a representative subset of all possible runs. The stateful approach builds a transition system with representative runs, while the…
Human preferences are not always represented via complete linear orders: It is natural to employ partially-ordered preferences for expressing incomparable outcomes. In this work, we consider decision-making and probabilistic planning in…
Learning and planning in partially-observable domains is one of the most difficult problems in reinforcement learning. Traditional methods consider these two problems as independent, resulting in a classical two-stage paradigm: first learn…
We identify two unreasonable, though standard, assumptions made by database query optimizers that can adversely affect the quality of the chosen evaluation plans. One assumption is that it is enough to optimize for the expected case---that…