Keynote Speaker
Index Policies: Recent Advances, Future Challenges, and Opportunities for Managing an Agentic World
Professor and Global STEM Scholar
Department of Information Engineering
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong SAR, China
Abstract
We are increasingly facing resource allocation problems involving many stateful agents, ranging from scheduling wireless transmissions to managing LLM inference tasks. When our performance objective is time-related, e.g., latency, freshness, or completion time, we often need to model the problem as a multi-agent MDP (Markov Decision Process), which unfortunately incurs exponentially high complexity when the problem size is large.
Index policies, e.g., the Whittle index, can be a useful tool to decompose an otherwise intractable multi-agent MDP into subproblems and produce low-complexity, scalable and adaptive solutions. However, the existing theory of Whittle index still has many severe limitations, preventing its use in many practically interesting scenarios.
In this talk, I will introduce some of our recent progress in expanding the use-cases for index policies, especially in dealing with situations where non-indexability arises and where there is a global source of randomness that affects all agents. I will conclude with some thoughts on how index policies could potentially be used to manage computation and communication of agentic workload, as well as on future challenges.
Bio
Xiaojun Lin received his B.S. from Zhongshan University, Guangzhou, China, in 1994, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, in 2000 and 2005, respectively. He joined the faculty of School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University in 2005, and became a Professor in 2017. Since June 2023, he joined the Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, as a Professor and Global STEM Scholar.
Dr. Lin’s research interests are in the analysis, control and learning of large and complex networked systems, including both communication networks and cyber-physical systems. He received 2005 best paper of the year award from Journal of Communications and Networks, IEEE INFOCOM 2008 best paper award, ACM MobiHoc 2021 best paper award, and ACM e-Energy 2022 best paper award. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2007. He has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, as an Area Editor for (Elsevier) Computer Networks journal, and as a Guest Editor for (Elsevier) Ad Hoc Networks journal. Dr. Lin is a Fellow of IEEE.
