193 research outputs found
Optimal Online Contention Resolution Schemes via Ex-Ante Prophet Inequalities
Online contention resolution schemes (OCRSs) were proposed by Feldman, Svensson, and Zenklusen [Moran Feldman et al., 2016] as a generic technique to round a fractional solution in the matroid polytope in an online fashion. It has found applications in several stochastic combinatorial problems where there is a commitment constraint: on seeing the value of a stochastic element, the algorithm has to immediately and irrevocably decide whether to select it while always maintaining an independent set in the matroid. Although OCRSs immediately lead to prophet inequalities, these prophet inequalities are not optimal. Can we instead use prophet inequalities to design optimal OCRSs?
We design the first optimal 1/2-OCRS for matroids by reducing the problem to designing a matroid prophet inequality where we compare to the stronger benchmark of an ex-ante relaxation. We also introduce and design optimal (1-1/e)-random order CRSs for matroids, which are similar to OCRSs but the arrival order is chosen uniformly at random
Polymatroid Prophet Inequalities
Consider a gambler and a prophet who observe a sequence of independent,
non-negative numbers. The gambler sees the numbers one-by-one whereas the
prophet sees the entire sequence at once. The goal of both is to decide on
fractions of each number they want to keep so as to maximize the weighted
fractional sum of the numbers chosen.
The classic result of Krengel and Sucheston (1977-78) asserts that if both
the gambler and the prophet can pick one number, then the gambler can do at
least half as well as the prophet. Recently, Kleinberg and Weinberg (2012) have
generalized this result to settings where the numbers that can be chosen are
subject to a matroid constraint.
In this note we go one step further and show that the bound carries over to
settings where the fractions that can be chosen are subject to a polymatroid
constraint. This bound is tight as it is already tight for the simple setting
where the gambler and the prophet can pick only one number. An interesting
application of our result is in mechanism design, where it leads to improved
results for various problems
Prophet Inequalities with Limited Information
In the classical prophet inequality, a gambler observes a sequence of
stochastic rewards and must decide, for each reward ,
whether to keep it and stop the game or to forfeit the reward forever and
reveal the next value . The gambler's goal is to obtain a constant
fraction of the expected reward that the optimal offline algorithm would get.
Recently, prophet inequalities have been generalized to settings where the
gambler can choose items, and, more generally, where he can choose any
independent set in a matroid. However, all the existing algorithms require the
gambler to know the distribution from which the rewards are
drawn.
The assumption that the gambler knows the distribution from which
are drawn is very strong. Instead, we work with the much simpler
assumption that the gambler only knows a few samples from this distribution. We
construct the first single-sample prophet inequalities for many settings of
interest, whose guarantees all match the best possible asymptotically,
\emph{even with full knowledge of the distribution}. Specifically, we provide a
novel single-sample algorithm when the gambler can choose any elements
whose analysis is based on random walks with limited correlation. In addition,
we provide a black-box method for converting specific types of solutions to the
related \emph{secretary problem} to single-sample prophet inequalities, and
apply it to several existing algorithms. Finally, we provide a constant-sample
prophet inequality for constant-degree bipartite matchings.
We apply these results to design the first posted-price and multi-dimensional
auction mechanisms with limited information in settings with asymmetric
bidders
Advances on Matroid Secretary Problems: Free Order Model and Laminar Case
The most well-known conjecture in the context of matroid secretary problems
claims the existence of a constant-factor approximation applicable to any
matroid. Whereas this conjecture remains open, modified forms of it were shown
to be true, when assuming that the assignment of weights to the secretaries is
not adversarial but uniformly random (Soto [SODA 2011], Oveis Gharan and
Vondr\'ak [ESA 2011]). However, so far, there was no variant of the matroid
secretary problem with adversarial weight assignment for which a
constant-factor approximation was found. We address this point by presenting a
9-approximation for the \emph{free order model}, a model suggested shortly
after the introduction of the matroid secretary problem, and for which no
constant-factor approximation was known so far. The free order model is a
relaxed version of the original matroid secretary problem, with the only
difference that one can choose the order in which secretaries are interviewed.
Furthermore, we consider the classical matroid secretary problem for the
special case of laminar matroids. Only recently, a constant-factor
approximation has been found for this case, using a clever but rather involved
method and analysis (Im and Wang, [SODA 2011]) that leads to a
16000/3-approximation. This is arguably the most involved special case of the
matroid secretary problem for which a constant-factor approximation is known.
We present a considerably simpler and stronger -approximation, based on reducing the problem to a matroid secretary
problem on a partition matroid
Prophet Secretary for Combinatorial Auctions and Matroids
The secretary and the prophet inequality problems are central to the field of
Stopping Theory. Recently, there has been a lot of work in generalizing these
models to multiple items because of their applications in mechanism design. The
most important of these generalizations are to matroids and to combinatorial
auctions (extends bipartite matching). Kleinberg-Weinberg \cite{KW-STOC12} and
Feldman et al. \cite{feldman2015combinatorial} show that for adversarial
arrival order of random variables the optimal prophet inequalities give a
-approximation. For many settings, however, it's conceivable that the
arrival order is chosen uniformly at random, akin to the secretary problem. For
such a random arrival model, we improve upon the -approximation and obtain
-approximation prophet inequalities for both matroids and
combinatorial auctions. This also gives improvements to the results of Yan
\cite{yan2011mechanism} and Esfandiari et al. \cite{esfandiari2015prophet} who
worked in the special cases where we can fully control the arrival order or
when there is only a single item.
Our techniques are threshold based. We convert our discrete problem into a
continuous setting and then give a generic template on how to dynamically
adjust these thresholds to lower bound the expected total welfare.Comment: Preliminary version appeared in SODA 2018. This version improves the
writeup on Fixed-Threshold algorithm
Online Contention Resolution Schemes
We introduce a new rounding technique designed for online optimization
problems, which is related to contention resolution schemes, a technique
initially introduced in the context of submodular function maximization. Our
rounding technique, which we call online contention resolution schemes (OCRSs),
is applicable to many online selection problems, including Bayesian online
selection, oblivious posted pricing mechanisms, and stochastic probing models.
It allows for handling a wide set of constraints, and shares many strong
properties of offline contention resolution schemes. In particular, OCRSs for
different constraint families can be combined to obtain an OCRS for their
intersection. Moreover, we can approximately maximize submodular functions in
the online settings we consider.
We, thus, get a broadly applicable framework for several online selection
problems, which improves on previous approaches in terms of the types of
constraints that can be handled, the objective functions that can be dealt
with, and the assumptions on the strength of the adversary. Furthermore, we
resolve two open problems from the literature; namely, we present the first
constant-factor constrained oblivious posted price mechanism for matroid
constraints, and the first constant-factor algorithm for weighted stochastic
probing with deadlines.Comment: 33 pages. To appear in SODA 201
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