Related papers: On the Variance of the Optimal Alignments Score fo…

We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…

The Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) problem is a very important problem in math- ematics, which has a broad application in scheduling problems, physics and bioinformatics. It is known that the given two random sequences of infinite…

Let $C \subseteq [r]^m$ be a code such that any two words of $C$ have Hamming distance at least $t$. It is not difficult to see that determining a code $C$ with the maximum number of words is equivalent to finding the largest $n$ such that…

Large language models (LLMs) obtain state of the art zero shot relevance ranking performance on a variety of information retrieval tasks. The two most common prompts to elicit LLM relevance judgments are pointwise scoring (a.k.a. relevance…

Many consensus string problems are based on Hamming distance. We replace Hamming distance by the more flexible (e.g., easily coping with different input string lengths) dynamic time warping distance, best known from applications in time…

Finding an optimal assignment between two sets of objects is a fundamental problem arising in many applications, including the matching of `bag-of-words' representations in natural language processing and computer vision. Solving the…

The problem of approximate string matching is important in many different areas such as computational biology, text processing and pattern recognition. A great effort has been made to design efficient algorithms addressing several variants…

This paper concerns the problem of aligning samples from large language models to human preferences using best-of-$n$ sampling, where we draw $n$ samples, rank them, and return the best one. We consider two fundamental problems. First: what…

String matching is the problem of finding all the occurrences of a pattern in a text. We propose improved versions of the fast family of string matching algorithms based on hashing $q$-grams. The improvement consists of considering minimal…

In this paper, we propose to study the following maximum ordinal consensus problem: Suppose we are given a metric system (M, X), which contains k metrics M = {\rho_1,..., \rho_k} defined on the same point set X. We aim to find a maximum…

Various measures have been proposed to quantify human-like social biases in word embeddings. However, bias scores based on these measures can suffer from measurement error. One indication of measurement quality is reliability, concerning…

We prove that a uniformly random automaton with $n$ states on a 2-letter alphabet has a synchronizing word of length $O(n^{1/2}\log n)$ with high probability (w.h.p.). That is to say, w.h.p. there exists a word $\omega$ of such length, and…

We propose novel algorithms for sequence prediction based on ideas from stringology. These algorithms are time and space efficient and satisfy mistake bounds related to particular stringological complexity measures of the sequence. In this…

We consider sequences of finite weighted random graphs that converge locally to unimodular i.i.d. weighted random trees. When the weights are atomless, we prove that the matchings of maximal weight converge locally to a matching on the…

We give the distribution of $M_n$, the maximum of a sequence of $n$ observations from a moving average of order 1. Solutions are first given in terms of repeated integrals and then for the case where the underlying independent random…

We show that the first-order logical theory of the binary overlap-free words (and, more generally, the ${\alpha}$-free words for rational ${\alpha}$, $2 < {\alpha} \leq 7/3$), is decidable. As a consequence, many results previously obtained…

Approximate string matching is the problem of finding all factors of a text t of length n that are at a distance at most k from a pattern x of length m. Approximate circular string matching is the problem of finding all factors of t that…

We find a two term asymptotic expansion for the optimal expected value of a sequentially selected monotone subsequence from a random permutation of length n. A striking feature of this expansion is that tells us that the expected value of…

Perfect sorting by reversals, a problem originating in computational genomics, is the process of sorting a signed permutation to either the identity or to the reversed identity permutation, by a sequence of reversals that do not break any…

Modern neural networks have greatly improved performance across speech recognition benchmarks. However, gains are often driven by frequent words with limited semantic weight, which can obscure meaningful differences in word error rate, the…