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1. Optimal and learned algorithms for the online list update problem with Zipfian accesses

   Indyk, Piotr; Quaye, Isabelle; Rubinfeld, Ronitt; Silwal, Sandeep (February 2025, 36th International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT 2025))

   The online list update problem is defined as follows: we are given a list of items and the cost to access any particular item is its position from the start of the list. A sequence of item accesses come online, and our goal is to dynamically reorder the list so that the aggregate access cost is small. We study the stochastic version of the problem where the items are accessed i.i.d. from an unknown distribution p. The study of the stochastic version goes back at least 60 years to McCabe. In this paper, we first consider the simple online algorithm which swaps an accessed item with the item right before it, unless it is at the very front. This algorithm is known as the Transposition rule. Wetheoretically analyze the stationary behavior of Transposition and prove that its performance is within 1 + o(1) factor of the optimal offline algorithm for access sequences sampled from heavy-tailed distributions, proving a conjecture of Rivest from 1976. While the stationary behavior of the Transposition rule is theoretically optimal in the aforemen tioned i.i.d setting, it can catastrophically fail under adversarial access sequences where only the last and second to last items are repeatedly accessed. A desirable outcome would be a policy that performs well under both circumstances. To achieve this, we use reinforcement learning to design an adaptive policy that performs well for both the i.i.d. setting and the above-mentioned adversarial access. Unsurprisingly, the learned policy appears to be an interpolation between Move-to-Front and Transposition with its behavior closer to Move-to-Front for adversarial access sequences and closer to Transposition for sequences sampled from heavy tailed distributions suggesting that the policy is adaptive and capable of responding to patterns in the access sequence. 

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2. A 3.3904-Competitive Online Algorithm for List Update with Uniform Costs

   Basiak, Mateusz; Bienkowski, Marcin; Böhm, Martin; Chrobak, Marek; Jeż, Lukasz; Sgall, Jiri; Tatarczuk, Agnieszka (April 2025, arXiv)

   We consider the List Update problem where the cost of each swap is assumed to be 1. This is in contrast to the “standard” model, in which an algorithm is allowed to swap the requested item with previous items for free. We construct an online algorithm Full-Or-Partial-Move (Fpm), whose competitive ratio is at most 3.3904, improving over the previous best known bound of 4. 

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3. Predict and Match: Prophet Inequalities with Uncertain Supply

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3379470  

   Alijani, Reza; Banerjee, Siddhartha; Gollapudi, Sreenivas; Munagala, Kamesh; Wang, Kangning (May 2020, Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   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, we show a tight result: There is a fixed pricing scheme that has competitive ratio at most 2 - 1/μ, 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. 

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4. Online Platt scaling with calibeating

   Gupta, Chirag; Ramdas, Aaditya (July 2023, International Conference on Machine Learning)

   We present an online post-hoc calibration method, called Online Platt Scaling (OPS), which combines the Platt scaling technique with online logistic regression. We demonstrate that OPS smoothly adapts between i.i.d. and non-i.i.d. settings with distribution drift. Further, in scenarios where the best Platt scaling model is itself miscalibrated, we enhance OPS by incorporating a recently developed technique called calibeating to make it more robust. Theoretically, our resulting OPS+calibeating method is guaranteed to be calibrated for adversarial outcome sequences. Empirically, it is effective on a range of synthetic and real-world datasets, with and without distribution drifts, achieving superior performance without hyperparameter tuning. Finally, we extend all OPS ideas to the beta scaling method. 

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5. The Relationship between No-Regret Learning and Online Conformal Prediction

   Ramalingam, R; Kiyani, Shayan; Roth, A (July 2025, ICML 2025)

   Existing algorithms for online conformal prediction -- guaranteeing marginal coverage in adversarial settings -- are variants of online gradient descent (OGD), but their analyses of worst-case coverage do not follow from the regret guarantee of OGD. What is the relationship between no-regret learning and online conformal prediction? We observe that although standard regret guarantees imply marginal coverage in i.i.d. settings, this connection fails as soon as we either move to adversarial environments or ask for group conditional coverage. On the other hand, we show a tight connection between threshold calibrated coverage and swap-regret in adversarial settings, which extends to group-conditional (multi-valid) coverage. We also show that algorithms in the follow the perturbed leader family of no regret learning algorithms (which includes online gradient descent) can be used to give group-conditional coverage guarantees in adversarial settings for arbitrary grouping functions. Via this connection we analyze and conduct experiments using a multi-group generalization of the ACI algorithm of Gibbs & Candes [2021] 

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