Primal-Dual Schemes for Online Matching in Bounded Degree Graphs

We explore various generalizations of the online matching problem in a bipartite graph G as the b-matching problem [Kalyanasundaram and Pruhs, 2000], the allocation problem [Buchbinder et al., 2007], and the AdWords problem [Mehta et al., 2007] in a beyond-worst-case setting. Specifically, we assume that G is a (k, d)-bounded degree graph, introduced by Naor and Wajc [Naor and Wajc, 2018]. Such graphs model natural properties on the degrees of advertisers and queries in the allocation and AdWords problems. While previous work only considers the scenario where k ? d, we consider the interesting intermediate regime of k ? d and prove a tight competitive ratio as a function of k,d (under the small-bid assumption) of ?(k,d) = 1 - (1-k/d)?(1-1/d)^{d - k} for the b-matching and allocation problems. We exploit primal-dual schemes [Buchbinder et al., 2009; Azar et al., 2017] to design and analyze the corresponding tight upper and lower bounds. Finally, we show a separation between the allocation and AdWords problems. We demonstrate that ?(k,d) competitiveness is impossible for the AdWords problem even in (k,d)-bounded degree graphs

A General Framework for Learning-Augmented Online Allocation

Online allocation is a broad class of problems where items arriving online have to be allocated to agents who have a fixed utility/cost for each assigned item so to maximize/minimize some objective. This framework captures a broad range of fundamental problems such as the Santa Claus problem (maximizing minimum utility), Nash welfare maximization (maximizing geometric mean of utilities), makespan minimization (minimizing maximum cost), minimization of ?_p-norms, and so on. We focus on divisible items (i.e., fractional allocations) in this paper. Even for divisible items, these problems are characterized by strong super-constant lower bounds in the classical worst-case online model. In this paper, we study online allocations in the learning-augmented setting, i.e., where the algorithm has access to some additional (machine-learned) information about the problem instance. We introduce a general algorithmic framework for learning-augmented online allocation that produces nearly optimal solutions for this broad range of maximization and minimization objectives using only a single learned parameter for every agent. As corollaries of our general framework, we improve prior results of Lattanzi et al. (SODA 2020) and Li and Xian (ICML 2021) for learning-augmented makespan minimization, and obtain the first learning-augmented nearly-optimal algorithms for the other objectives such as Santa Claus, Nash welfare, ?_p-minimization, etc. We also give tight bounds on the resilience of our algorithms to errors in the learned parameters, and study the learnability of these parameters

A General Framework for Learning-Augmented Online Allocation

Online allocation is a broad class of problems where items arriving online have to be allocated to agents who have a fixed utility/cost for each assigned item so to maximize/minimize some objective. This framework captures a broad range of fundamental problems such as the Santa Claus problem (maximizing minimum utility), Nash welfare maximization (maximizing geometric mean of utilities), makespan minimization (minimizing maximum cost), minimization of $\ell_p$-norms, and so on. We focus on divisible items (i.e., fractional allocations) in this paper. Even for divisible items, these problems are characterized by strong super-constant lower bounds in the classical worst-case online model. In this paper, we study online allocations in the {\em learning-augmented} setting, i.e., where the algorithm has access to some additional (machine-learned) information about the problem instance. We introduce a {\em general} algorithmic framework for learning-augmented online allocation that produces nearly optimal solutions for this broad range of maximization and minimization objectives using only a single learned parameter for every agent. As corollaries of our general framework, we improve prior results of Lattanzi et al. (SODA 2020) and Li and Xian (ICML 2021) for learning-augmented makespan minimization, and obtain the first learning-augmented nearly-optimal algorithms for the other objectives such as Santa Claus, Nash welfare, $\ell_p$-minimization, etc. We also give tight bounds on the resilience of our algorithms to errors in the learned parameters, and study the learnability of these parameters

Pricing Multi-Unit Markets

We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed with posted prices, under a range of assumptions about the designer's information and agents' valuations. Our results provide insights about the relative power of uniform and non-uniform prices, the relative difficulty of different valuation classes, and the implications of different informational assumptions. Among other results, we prove constant-factor guarantees for agents with (symmetric) subadditive valuations, even in an incomplete-information setting and with uniform prices

Tight Bounds for Online Edge Coloring

Vizing's celebrated theorem asserts that any graph of maximum degree Delta admits an edge coloring using at most Delta + 1 colors. In contrast, Bar-Noy, Motwani and Naor showed over a quarter century ago that the trivial greedy algorithm, which uses 2 Delta - 1 colors, is optimal among online algorithms. Their lower bound has a caveat, however: it only applies to low-degree graphs, with Delta = O(log n), and they conjectured the existence of online algorithms using Delta (1+o(1)) colors for Delta = omega(log n). Progress towards resolving this conjecture was only made under stochastic arrivals (Aggarwal et al., FOCS'03 and Bahmani et al., SODA'10). We resolve the above conjecture for adversarial vertex arrivals in bipartite graphs, for which we present a (1+o(1))Delta-edge-coloring algorithm for Delta = omega(log n) known a priori. Surprisingly, if Delta is not known ahead of time, we show that no (e/e-1 - Omega(1)) Delta-edge-coloring algorithm exists. We then provide an optimal, (e/e-1 + o(1))Delta-edge-coloring algorithm for unknown Delta = omega(log n). To obtain our results, we study a nonstandard fractional relaxation for edge coloring, for which we present optimal fractional online algorithms and a near-lossless online rounding scheme, yielding our optimal randomized algorithms