Papers for

peer review coordinators

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Optimal task assignment policy improves resource reuse rewards

Lag: A Mean-Field Optimal Policy for Online Assignment with Reusable Resources

Abstract: We study online task assignment with reusable resources. This problem arises in peer reviewer assignment, skill-based call routing, rideshare matching, emergency dispatch, and crowdsourcing: Tasks arrive according to a geometric process and must be immediately assigned to servers that become temporarily busy, yielding rewards that depend on the task-server pair. The goal is to maximize long-run average reward. We cast the problem as a contextual restless multi-armed bandit (CRMAB). We derive an occupancy-measure LP (OCC-LP) that upper-bounds the reward of any work-conserving policy. From its dual we obtain Lag, a closed-form index policy. We introduce a scaling regime in which the number of copies of each server and the number of arrivals per step grow together. This regime yields the first deterministic fluid limit for a contextual bandit. In it, Lag is asymptotically optimal. Finally, we evaluate our algorithms on peer review datasets and call center routing. The Lagrangian index achieves 83-99% of the LP upper bound across all load levels. Moreover, the Lagrangian index policy significantly outperforms the natural greedy assignment scheme, improving reward by up to 12.3% on journal data and 36% on structured synthetic instances.

Tue 13 OctMachine LearningPerformance
The gist
Assigning tasks to busy but reusable resources such as call center agents or peer reviewers is a common but tricky problem where tasks arrive randomly and must be immediately matched to available servers. The authors study this by modeling it as a type of 'multi-armed bandit' problem with changing contexts. They develop a mathematical policy, called Lag, that helps decide task assignments to maximize long-term rewards. Tested on real and synthetic data, their policy consistently outperforms simpler methods and nearly matches the best possible theoretical reward.
Open → 2610.19038v1