EF1-Constrained Nash Social Welfare with Identical Additive Valuations: Complexity, Guarantees, and Experiments

📅 2026-09-03
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
📄 PDF
🤖 AI Summary
研究了在相同加性估值下不可分割物品的分配问题,通过提出PriorityNet深度强化学习框架来保证EF1并最大化Nash社会福利。
📝 Abstract
We study the allocation of indivisible goods among agents with identical additive valuations, focusing on envy-freeness up to one good (EF1) and Nash social welfare (NSW). Since every maximum-NSW allocation is EF1 under additive valuations, the associated threshold problem inherits the known strong NP-hardness of NSW maximization under identical additive valuations and is strongly NP-complete. We therefore focus on welfare guarantees satisfied by arbitrary EF1 allocations. Although every such allocation is known to achieve an $e^{-1/e}$-approximation to the unrestricted optimal NSW, we identify conditions yielding stronger guarantees. Under uniform valuations, every EF1 allocation is NSW-optimal. Under an $\varepsilon$-small-item condition, every EF1 allocation achieves an explicit approximation ratio $ρ_n(\varepsilon)$ satisfying $ρ_n(\varepsilon) = 1-O(\varepsilon^2)$ as $\varepsilon\to 0$ for fixed $n$. We further consider the stronger sequential requirement that EF1 be maintained after every item assignment. For this setting, we propose \emph{PriorityNet}, a deep reinforcement learning framework trained using Proximal Policy Optimization and equipped with prospective EF1 action masking. The mask restricts every decision to assignments that preserve EF1, thereby guaranteeing prefix-wise EF1 by construction without post-processing repair. Across 3,000 test instances in each of the offline and random-order online regimes ($n\in[2,20]$ and $m\in[5,100]$), PriorityNet attains mean normalized $\operatorname{NSW}$ values of $0.9911$ and $0.9701$, respectively. Relative to offline Longest Processing Time (LPT) and online least-valued-bundle baselines, it achieves instance-wise win-minus-loss rates of $+27.10\%$ and $+17.87\%$, while matching the offline baseline's mean normalized welfare to four decimal places and modestly improving the online mean from $0.9694$ to $0.9701$.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

EF1
Nash Social Welfare
identical additive valuations
welfare guarantees
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

PriorityNet
Deep Reinforcement Learning
EF1 Action Masking
Nash Social Welfare
🔎 Similar Papers
Z
Zih-Sian Yang
National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung City 202301, Taiwan
Y
Yi-Hao Chen
National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung City 202301, Taiwan
Y
Yu-Te Kuan
National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung City 202301, Taiwan
C
Cheng-Jui Wu
National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung City 202301, Taiwan
C
Chuang-Chieh Lin
National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung City 202301, Taiwan
P
Po-An Chen
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu City 300, Taiwan