The paper studies a budget‑constrained welfare problem for pooled testing, where agents have heterogeneous utilities and independent probabilities of being healthy. It proves that an optimal dynamic testing policy can achieve at most twice the welfare of the best static overlapping allocation, regardless of population, budget, or pool‑size limit. The authors also identify cases where adaptivity offers no benefit, show that re‑pooling after positive tests is necessary for strict gains, and provide approximation guarantees for greedy algorithms.
arXiv:2607. 26788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustered federated learning benefits from organizing heterogeneous participants into coalitions that train coalition-specific models, but such clustering is sustainable only if participants prefer their assigned coalition and the required transfers are affordable.
The paper explores how data from fixed A/B tests can guide the deployment of adaptive experiments using contextual bandits. By combining off‑policy evaluation with a controlled warm‑start simulation, the authors rank pre‑specified adaptive and non‑adaptive policies using doubly robust estimators. Experiments on synthetic trials and real benchmarks show that adaptive, context‑aware policies outperform fixed allocations when heterogeneity exists, but offer little advantage otherwise.
arXiv:2610. 01377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study causal logistic bandits with counterfactual fairness constraints.
arXiv:2605. 00762v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study meritocratic fairness in budgeted combinatorial multi-armed bandits with full-bandit feedback, where a learner selects at most $K$ arms per time step and observes only the noisy aggregate reward of the selected set.
arXiv:2607. 11146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the coupled objective J_K^WOR = E_{S ~ PL-WOR_K}[max_{i in S} R_i]: the expected maximum reward of a size-K Plackett-Luce draw without replacement, the law of Gumbel-Top-K / Stochastic Beam Search decoding.
arXiv:2606. 18111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fairness is an important aspect of decision-making in multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), where policies must ensure both optimality and equity across multiple, potentially conflicting objectives.
arXiv:2505. 15201v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms sample multiple n>1 solution attempts for each problem and reward them independently.
arXiv:2507. 09473v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the dynamic allocation of indivisible resources to strategic agents under long-term constraints, where the planner aims to maximize social welfare, satisfy multiple constraints, and elicit near-truthful reports.
arXiv:2609.27869v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon multimodal agents rely on specialized capabilities for perception, retrieval, reasoning, verification, and execution. Existing designs typ...
arXiv:2603. 17925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider a variant of sequential testing by betting where, at each time step, the statistician is presented with multiple data sources (arms) and obtains data by choosing one of the arms.
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%.
arXiv:2605. 01961v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from human preference data is becoming a useful tool, from fine-tuning large language models to training reinforcement learning agents.