No Arabic abstract
We initiate the study of an interesting aspect of sponsored search advertising, namely the consequences of broad match-a feature where an ad of an advertiser can be mapped to a broader range of relevant queries, and not necessarily to the particular keyword(s) that ad is associated with. Starting with a very natural setting for strategies available to the advertisers, and via a careful look through the algorithmic lens, we first propose solution concepts for the game originating from the strategic behavior of advertisers as they try to optimize their budget allocation across various keywords. Next, we consider two broad match scenarios based on factors such as information asymmetry between advertisers and the auctioneer, and the extent of auctioneers control on the budget splitting. In the first scenario, the advertisers have the full information about broad match and relevant parameters, and can reapportion their own budgets to utilize the extra information; in particular, the auctioneer has no direct control over budget splitting. We show that, the same broad match may lead to different equilibria, one leading to a revenue improvement, whereas another to a revenue loss. This leaves the auctioneer in a dilemma - whether to broad-match or not. This motivates us to consider another broad match scenario, where the advertisers have information only about the current scenario, and the allocation of the budgets unspent in the current scenario is in the control of the auctioneer. We observe that the auctioneer can always improve his revenue by judiciously using broad match. Thus, information seems to be a double-edged sword for the auctioneer.
In a dynamic matching market, such as a marriage or job market, how should agents balance accepting a proposed match with the cost of continuing their search? We consider this problem in a discrete setting, in which agents have cardinal values and finite lifetimes, and proposed matches are random. We seek to quantify how well the agents can do. We provide upper and lower bounds on the collective losses of the agents, with a polynomially small failure probability, where the notion of loss is with respect to a plausible baseline we define. These bounds are tight up to constant factors. We highlight two aspects of this work. First, in our model, agents have a finite time in which to enjoy their matches, namely the minimum of their remaining lifetime and that of their partner; this implies that unmatched agents become less desirable over time, and suggests that their decision rules should change over time. Second, we use a discrete rather than a continuum model for the population. The discreteness causes variance which induces localized imbalances in the two sides of the market. One of the main technical challenges we face is to bound these imbalances. In addition, we present the results of simulations on moderate-sized problems for both the discrete and continu
Best match graphs (BMG) are a key intermediate in graph-based orthology detection and contain a large amount of information on the gene tree. We provide a near-cubic algorithm to determine whether a BMG is binary-explainable, i.e., whether it can be explained by a fully resolved gene tree and, if so, to construct such a tree. Moreover, we show that all such binary trees are refinements of the unique binary-resolvable tree (BRT), which in general is a substantial refinement of the also unique least resolved tree of a BMG. Finally, we show that the problem of editing an arbitrary vertex-colored graph to a binary-explainable BMG is NP-complete and provide an integer linear program formulation for this task.
We consider the problem of selling perishable items to a stream of buyers in order to maximize social welfare. A seller starts with a set of identical items, and each arriving buyer wants any one item, and has a valuation drawn i.i.d. from a known distribution. Each item, however, disappears after an a priori unknown amount of time that we term the horizon for that item. The seller knows the (possibly different) distribution of the horizon for each item, but not its realization till the item actually disappears. As with the classic prophet inequalities, the goal is to design an online pricing scheme that competes with the prophet that knows the horizon and extracts full social surplus (or welfare). Our main results are for the setting where items have independent horizon distributions satisfying the monotone-hazard-rate (MHR) condition. Here, for any number of items, we achieve a constant-competitive bound via a conceptually simple policy that balances the rate at which buyers are accepted with the rate at which items are removed from the system. We implement this policy via a novel technique of matching via probabilistically simulating departures of the items at future times. Moreover, for a single item and MHR horizon distribution with mean $mu$, we show a tight result: There is a fixed pricing scheme that has competitive ratio at most $2 - 1/mu$, and this is the best achievable in this class. We further show that our results are best possible. First, we show that the competitive ratio is unbounded without the MHR assumption even for one item. Further, even when the horizon distributions are i.i.d. MHR and the number of items becomes large, the competitive ratio of any policy is lower bounded by a constant greater than $1$, which is in sharp contrast to the setting with identical deterministic horizons.
Best match graphs (BMGs) are vertex-colored digraphs that naturally arise in mathematical phylogenetics to formalize the notion of evolutionary closest genes w.r.t. an a priori unknown phylogenetic tree. BMGs are explained by unique least resolved trees. We prove that the property of a rooted, leaf-colored tree to be least resolved for some BMG is preserved by the contraction of inner edges. For the special case of two-colored BMGs, this leads to a characterization of the least resolved trees (LRTs) of binary-explainable trees and a simple, polynomial-time algorithm for the minimum cardinality completion of the arc set of a BMG to reach a BMG that can be explained by a binary tree.
When the training and test data are from different distributions, domain adaptation is needed to reduce dataset bias to improve the models generalization ability. Since it is difficult to directly match the cross-domain joint distributions, existing methods tend to reduce the marginal or conditional distribution divergence using predefined distances such as MMD and adversarial-based discrepancies. However, it remains challenging to determine which method is suitable for a given application since they are built with certain priors or bias. Thus they may fail to uncover the underlying relationship between transferable features and joint distributions. This paper proposes Learning to Match (L2M) to automatically learn the cross-domain distribution matching without relying on hand-crafted priors on the matching loss. Instead, L2M reduces the inductive bias by using a meta-network to learn the distribution matching loss in a data-driven way. L2M is a general framework that unifies task-independent and human-designed matching features. We design a novel optimization algorithm for this challenging objective with self-supervised label propagation. Experiments on public datasets substantiate the superiority of L2M over SOTA methods. Moreover, we apply L2M to transfer from pneumonia to COVID-19 chest X-ray images with remarkable performance. L2M can also be extended in other distribution matching applications where we show in a trial experiment that L2M generates more realistic and sharper MNIST samples.