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Joey Rivkin

Publications and source records attributed to Joey Rivkin.

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Improved Multi-Dimensional Forecasting for Swap Regret

We study the problem of forecasting for an arbitrary number of downstream agents with unknown objectives, each of whom best responds to the forecaster's predictions. We seek a single forecaster that guarantees sublinear swap regret for all downstream agents simultaneously. For two-dimensional outcome spaces, we give a polynomial time algorithm that guarantees $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{kT})$ swap regret for any downstream agent with $k$ actions. This improves over the previously known bound of $\tilde{O}(kT^{5/8})$ and avoids the exponential in $T$ runtime of prior algorithms in this setting. Our algorithm extends nicely to other low dimensional environments, retaining $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ downstream swap regret while the exponent of $k$ in the regret bound and the exponent of $T$ in the running time both grow with dimension. For arbitrary dimension $d$, we give a forecasting algorithm that guarantees $\tilde{O}(d\sqrt{kT})$ swap regret, assuming the forecaster knows an upper bound $k$ on the number of actions available to any downstream agent, albeit with a much longer runtime. This improves upon previous high dimensional guarantees that had $\tilde{O}(T^{2/3})$ dependence and required additional behavioral assumptions.

cs.GT

A Generalized Trace Reconstruction Problem: Recovering a String of Probabilities

We introduce the following natural generalization of trace reconstruction, parameterized by a deletion probability $δ\in (0,1)$ and length $n$: There is a length $n$ string of probabilities, $S=p_1,\ldots,p_n,$ and each "trace" is obtained by 1) sampling a length $n$ binary string whose $i$th coordinate is independently set to 1 with probability $p_i$ and 0 otherwise, and then 2) deleting each of the binary values independently with probability $δ$, and returning the corresponding binary string of length $\le n$. The goal is to recover an estimate of $S$ from a set of independently drawn traces. In the case that all $p_i \in \{0,1\}$ this is the standard trace reconstruction problem. We show two complementary results. First, for worst-case strings $S$ and any deletion probability at least order $1/\sqrt{n}$, no algorithm can approximate $S$ to constant $\ell_\infty$ distance or $\ell_1$ distance $o(\sqrt n)$ using fewer than $2^{Ω(\sqrt{n})}$ traces. Second -- as in the case for standard trace reconstruction -- reconstruction is easy for random $S$: for any sufficiently small constant deletion probability, and any $ε>0$, drawing each $p_i$ independently from the uniform distribution over $[0,1]$, with high probability $S$ can be recovered to $\ell_1$ error $ε$ using $\mathrm{poly}(n,1/ε)$ traces and computation time. We show indistinguishability in our lower bound by regarding a complicated alternating sum (comparing two distributions) as the Fourier transformation of some function evaluated at $\pm π,$ and then showing that the Fourier transform decays rapidly away from zero by analyzing its moment generating function.

cs.DS