arXiv:2508.03253cs.GTcs.AI2025-08被引 10

在线分配中,如何近似公平分给每个用户至少应得份额?

Approximate Proportionality in Online Fair Division

  • 用随机分配在非自适应对手下逼近比例公平性
  • 小物品价值时近似比例公平性概率很高
  • 引入价值预测可实现稳健的公平性保障

我们研究在线公平分配问题:不可分物品按序到达,必须即时且不可撤销地分配。已有研究证明,难以近似经典公平标准如‘最多差一物’(EF1)和‘最大最小份额’(MMS),但‘比例公平至多差一物’(PROP1)的可近似性尚未明确。本文分两步解决:首先,证明三种常见贪心规则对自适应对手无法保证任何乘法近似;进而提出两个放松条件:(i) 限制为非自适应对手,(ii) 引入粗略预测,借鉴学习增强算法思想。在非自适应对手下,均匀随机分配在高概率下实现有意义的PROP1近似,且该界基本紧;当物品价值足够小时,分配近乎满足PROP1。此外,若已知最大物品价值(MIV),设计出的算法能实现鲁棒的PROP1近似,并在单边预测误差下平稳退化。相反,即使拥有完美MIV预测,仍无法近似EF1、MMS和PROPX。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

We study the online fair division problem, where indivisible goods arrive sequentially and must be allocated immediately and irrevocably. Prior work establishes strong impossibility results for approximating classic notions such as envy-freeness up to one good (EF1) and maximin share (MMS) in this setting, but the approximability of proportionality up to one good (PROP1) has remained unresolved. We resolve this gap in two steps. First, we show that three natural greedy allocation rules (standard baselines in fair division) fail to guarantee any multiplicative approximation to PROP1 against an adaptive adversary. These limitations motivate two relaxations: (i) restricting attention to a non-adaptive adversary, and (ii) incorporating coarse predictions in the spirit of learning-augmented algorithms. Under a non-adaptive adversary, we show that the uniform random allocation achieves a meaningful PROP1 approximation with high probability, and this guarantee is essentially tight for this approach; moreover, when item values are sufficiently small, the allocation is near-PROP1 with high probability. Finally, given maximum item value (MIV) predictions, we design an online algorithm that achieves robust approximation guarantees for PROP1, and degrades gracefully under one-sided prediction error. In contrast, we show that EF1, MMS, and PROPX remain inapproximable even with perfect MIV predictions.

在线分配公平性算法设计

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