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Ramiro N. Deo-Campo Vuong

Publications and source records attributed to Ramiro N. Deo-Campo Vuong.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

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↗

Optimal Online Equitable Allocation with Indivisible Resources

Equitable allocation of indivisible goods to agents in online settings is an algorithmic primitive with applications for load balancing, network routing, online marketplaces, and multi-agent systems. We consider a general setting in which allocations are constrained to be bases of discrete polymatroids that arrive online. Our work demonstrates that a simple, myopic algorithm called Brick-Laying, which greedily minimizes the sum of squared loads on agents, achieves a universal and objective-free notion of optimality called majorization minimax-optimality [BDK26] for this setting. As a consequence, Brick-Laying simultaneously guarantees minimax optimal competitive ratios and regret for all Schur-concave and Schur-convex objectives, and for any number of agents and resources (despite being agnostic to problem scale). Departing from popular primal-dual analysis, we employ majorization to compare allocations. We leverage the conjugates of integer partitions -- which act as a discrete dual to majorization -- to characterize worst-case instances for the Brick-Laying algorithm. Our approach reveals a novel structural connection between the geometry of partitions and online equitable allocation.

cs.DS↗

Water-Filling is Universally Minimax Optimal

Allocation of dynamically-arriving (i.e., online) divisible resources among a set of offline agents is a fundamental problem, with applications to online marketplaces, scheduling, portfolio selection, signal processing, and many other areas. The water-filling algorithm, which allocates an incoming resource to maximize the minimum load of compatible agents, is ubiquitous in many of these applications whenever the underlying objectives prefer more balanced solutions; however, the analysis and guarantees differ across settings. We provide a justification for the widespread use of water-filling by showing that it is a universally minimax optimal policy in a strong sense. Formally, our main result implies that water-filling is minimax optimal for a large class of objectives -- including both Schur-concave maximization and Schur-convex minimization -- under $α$-regret and competitive ratio measures. This optimality holds for every fixed tuple of agents and resource counts. Remarkably, water-filling achieves these guarantees as a myopic policy, remaining entirely agnostic to the objective function, agent count, and resource availability. Our techniques notably depart from the popular primal-dual analysis of online algorithms, and instead develop a novel way to apply the theory of majorization in online settings to achieve universality guarantees.

cs.DS↗

The Keychain Problem: On Minimizing the Opportunity Cost of Uncertainty

In this paper, we introduce a family of sequential decision-making problems, collectively termed the Keychain Problem, that involve exploring a set of actions to maximize expected payoff when only a subset of actions are available in each stage. In an instance of the Keychain Problem, a locksmith faces a sequence of decisions, each of which involves selecting one key from a keychain (a subset of keys) to attempt to open a lock. Given a Bayesian prior on the effectiveness of keys, the locksmith's goal is to minimize the opportunity cost, which is the expected number of rounds in which the chain has a correct key but our selected key is incorrect. We study the computation of the Bayes optimal solution for Keychain Problems. Employing polynomial-time reductions, we establish formal connections between natural variants of the Keychain Problem and well-studied algorithmic economics problems on bipartite graphs. When the keychain order is known to the locksmith, we show that it reduces to Maximum Weight Bipartite Matching (MWBM). More general is the situation when the keychain order is sampled from a prior distribution (possibly correlated with the correct key). Here the Keychain Problem reduces to a novel generalization of MWBM which we coin the Maximum Weight Laminar Matching, which then further reduces to combinatorial auctions under XOS valuation functions. Finally, we show that when the locksmith can choose the keychain order, the Keychain problem reduces from a classic NP-hard combinatorial problem, again, on bipartite graphs. Besides implying algorithmic results and deepening our structural understanding about the Keychain Problem, our established reductions also find applications beyond -- for example, to the Philosopher Inequality for online bipartite matching.

cs.GT↗