The paper introduces Lag, a mean‑field optimal index policy for online assignment problems with reusable resources, such as peer review, call routing, ridesharing, emergency dispatch, and crowdsourcing. By modeling the problem as a contextual restless multi‑armed bandit and deriving an occupancy‑measure linear program, the authors obtain Lag from the dual and prove it is asymptotically optimal in a scaling regime where server copies and arrivals grow together. Experiments on peer‑review and call‑center data show Lag achieves 83–99% of the LP upper bound and outperforms greedy assignment by up to 36% in synthetic settings.
arXiv:2602. 09456v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose an algorithmic framework, Offline Estimation to Decisions (OE2D), that efficiently reduces contextual bandit learning with general reward function approximation to offline regression.
arXiv:2607. 13546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mobile crowdsensing (MC) recruits mobile users to perform sensing tasks using their smartphones, enabling large-scale applications such as traffic monitoring and environmental sensing.
The paper introduces PFN‑OPE, a prior‑data fitted network that performs amortized off‑policy evaluation (OPE) for large language models (LLMs). Unlike traditional OPE methods that must be retrained for each new logged dataset or reward definition, PFN‑OPE is pretrained once on a diverse set of contextual‑bandit tasks and can estimate value for any new logged dataset and target response in a single forward pass. Experiments on HelpSteer2 and UltraFeedback with Qwen, Llama, and Gemma policies show that PFN‑OPE reduces error by 2.0 to 9.3 times compared to the best baselines in reward‑shifted settings.
arXiv:2602. 02061v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Explosive demands for LLMs often cause user queries to accumulate in server queues, requiring efficient routing (query-LLM matching) and scheduling (query prioritization) mechanisms.
arXiv:2607. 23772v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study a restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem for a stochastic deadline scheduling application.
arXiv:2606. 17489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in edge-cloud inference systems to handle diverse user tasks with heterogeneous accuracy, latency, and cost profiles.
We study the contextual combinatorial semi-bandit (CCSB) problem with general reward function approximation. At each round, the learner observes a context, selects a combinatorial action consisting of a subset of basic arms, and receives the reward of each selected arm; the goal is to maximize the cumulative reward over time.
arXiv:2004. 06321v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the sequential batch learning problem in linear contextual bandits with finite action sets, where the decision maker is constrained to split incoming individuals into (at most) a fixed number of batches and can only observe outcomes for the individuals within a batch at the batch's end.
arXiv:2607. 13686v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the contextual combinatorial semi-bandit (CCSB) problem with general reward function approximation.
Mobile crowdsensing (MC) recruits mobile users to perform sensing tasks using their smartphones, enabling large-scale applications such as traffic monitoring and environmental sensing. A fundamental challenge is online worker recruitment under uncertainty, where the platform must learn workers' sensing performance while operating with a limited budget.
arXiv:2606. 00835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Network routers that enforce Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees must decide, at every clock cycle, which expiring packet of information to transmit, even when the value of the packet is unknown until it is processed.
arXiv:2607. 23765v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance across multiple domains, but using the most capable model for every query is prohibitive at scale.