arXiv AI

Discrete-Time MDP Modeling for Multi-Item Capacitated Lot Sizing with Stochastic Demand Timing

The paper introduces a discrete‑time Markov decision process (DTMDP) model for a finite‑horizon, multi‑item capacitated lot‑sizing problem where demand quantities are deterministic but demand‑arrival times are stochastic. It compares stochastic instances to deterministic counterparts, showing that stochastic timing significantly enlarges the state space, transitions, solution time, and memory usage. A genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to search feasible state‑feedback policies, achieving an average optimality gap of about 3.44 % and a speedup of roughly 6.89× on challenging benchmark instances.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Leveraging Inference-Time Compute for Diffusion Models via Global Scheduling of Denoising Trajectories

The paper studies how to allocate a fixed computational budget across the denoising steps of diffusion models to improve sample quality at deployment. It shows that the expected benefit of evaluating multiple candidates at a step can be decomposed into a step‑specific sensitivity and a universal sample‑size factor, and that the optimal allocation follows a water‑filling structure. Experiments demonstrate that this allocation achieves the same quality as a uniform strategy while reducing function evaluations by 20–50%.

By Yuan Cao, Yifu Tang, Hangqi Li, Zeyu Zheng
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Strategic Buying Agents

arXiv:2607. 04708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI is shifting online shopping from search toward delegated purchasing, where autonomous buying agents monitor markets and decide when to buy on a consumer's behalf.

By Mingyang Fu, Ming Hu