In the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry, deciding where to place physical assets, such as commercial beverage coolers, can directly impact revenue growth and execution efficiency. Although churn prediction and demand forecasting have been widely studied in B2B contexts, the use of machine learning to guide asset allocation remains relatively unexplored. This paper presents a framework focused on predicting which beverage clients are most likely to deliver strong returns in volume after receiving a cooler. Using a private dataset from a well-known Central American brewing and beverage company of 3,119 B2B traditional trade channel clients that received a cooler from 2022-01 to 2024-07, and tracking 12 months of sales transactions before and after cooler installation, three growth thresholds were defined: 10%, 30% and 50% growth in sales volume year over year. The analysis compares results of machine learning models such as XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost combined with SHAP for interpretable feature analysis in order to have insights into improving business operations related to cooler allocation; the results show that the best model has AUC scores of 0.857, 0.877, and 0.898 across the thresholds on the validation set. Simulations suggest that this approach can improve ROI because it better selects potential clients to grow at the expected level and increases cost savings by not assigning clients that will not grow, compared to traditional volume-based approaches with substantial business management recommendations

Abstract--Accurate, fair, and explainable allocation of candidates to roles represents a fundamental challenge across multiple domains including corporate hiring, academic admissions, fellowship awards, and volunteer placement systems. Current state-of-the-art approaches suffer from semantic inflexibility, persistent demographic bias, opacity in decision-making processes, and poor scalability under dynamic policy constraints. Our experimental evaluation on large-scale international benchmarks comprising 20,000 candidate profiles and 3,000 role specifications demonstrates superior performance with 94.5% top-3 allocation accuracy, 37% improvement in diversity representation, 0.98 fairness score across demographic categories, and sub-second end-to-end latency. Additionally, GESA incorporates hybrid recommendation capabilities and glass-box explainability, making it suitable for deployment across diverse international contexts in industry, academia, and non-profit sectors. The problem of matching candidates to appropriate roles efficiently and fairly represents one of the most critical challenges in modern organizational and institutional decision-making processes. This challenge spans multiple domains: corporate talent acquisition where companies struggle to identify optimal candidates from thousands of applications [1], academic admissions where universities must select students who will thrive in specific programs [2], research fellowship allocation where funding bodies need to match candidates with projects [3], and volunteer placement systems where non-profit organizations seek to optimize volunteer-task assignments [4]. Despite decades of research and development, existing allocation systems continue to exhibit fundamental limitations that significantly impact their effectiveness and fairness. First, semantic inflexibility remains a persistent issue--traditional keyword-based and static embedding approaches fail to capture the nuanced contextual relationships between candidate qualifications and role requirements [5].

A growing body of work in Ethical AI attempts to capture human moral judgments through simple computational models. The key question we address in this work is whether such simple AI models capture {the critical} nuances of moral decision-making by focusing on the use case of kidney allocation. We conducted twenty interviews where participants explained their rationale for their judgments about who should receive a kidney. We observe participants: (a) value patients' morally-relevant attributes to different degrees; (b) use diverse decision-making processes, citing heuristics to reduce decision complexity; (c) can change their opinions; (d) sometimes lack confidence in their decisions (e.g., due to incomplete information); and (e) express enthusiasm and concern regarding AI assisting humans in kidney allocation decisions. Based on these findings, we discuss challenges of computationally modeling moral judgments {as a stand-in for human input}, highlight drawbacks of current approaches, and suggest future directions to address these issues.

In retail warehouses, returned products are typically placed in an intermediate storage until a decision regarding further shipment to stores is made. The longer products are held in storage, the higher the inefficiency and costs of the returns management process, since enough storage area has to be provided and maintained while the products are not placed for sale. To reduce the average product storage time, we consider an alternative solution where reallocation decisions for products can be made instantly upon their arrival in the warehouse allowing only a limited number of products to still be stored simultaneously. We transfer the problem to an online multiple knapsack problem and propose a novel reinforcement learning approach to pack the items (products) into the knapsacks (stores) such that the overall value (expected revenue) is maximized. Empirical evaluations on simulated data demonstrate that, compared to the usual offline decision procedure, our approach comes with a performance gap of only 3% while significantly reducing the average storage time of a product by 96%. 1 Introduction Managing returns is a central process in the retail supply chain as it has a high impact on the companies' costs and their sustainability [16].

Generative AI (GenAI) has emerged as a transformative technology, enabling customized and personalized AI-generated content (AIGC) services. In this paper, we address challenges of edge-enabled AIGC service provisioning, which remain underexplored in the literature. These services require executing GenAI models with billions of parameters, posing significant obstacles to resource-limited wireless edge. We subsequently introduce the formulation of joint model caching and resource allocation for AIGC services to balance a trade-off between AIGC quality and latency metrics. We obtain mathematical relationships of these metrics with the computational resources required by GenAI models via experimentation. Afterward, we decompose the formulation into a model caching subproblem on a long-timescale and a resource allocation subproblem on a short-timescale. Since the variables to be solved are discrete and continuous, respectively, we leverage a double deep Q-network (DDQN) algorithm to solve the former subproblem and propose a diffusion-based deep deterministic policy gradient (D3PG) algorithm to solve the latter. The proposed D3PG algorithm makes an innovative use of diffusion models as the actor network to determine optimal resource allocation decisions. Consequently, we integrate these two learning methods within the overarching two-timescale deep reinforcement learning (T2DRL) algorithm, the performance of which is studied through comparative numerical simulations.

The forthcoming 6G networks will embrace a new realm of AI-driven services that requires innovative network slicing strategies, namely slicing for AI, which involves the creation of customized network slices to meet Quality of service (QoS) requirements of diverse AI services. This poses challenges due to time-varying dynamics of users' behavior and mobile networks. Thus, this paper proposes an online learning framework to optimize the allocation of computational and communication resources to AI services, while considering their unique key performance indicators (KPIs), such as accuracy, latency, and cost. We define a problem of optimizing the total accuracy while balancing conflicting KPIs, prove its NP-hardness, and propose an online learning framework for solving it in dynamic environments. We present a basic online solution and two variations employing a pre-learning elimination method for reducing the decision space to expedite the learning. Furthermore, we propose a biased decision space subset selection by incorporating prior knowledge to enhance the learning speed without compromising performance and present two alternatives of handling the selected subset. Our results depict the efficiency of the proposed solutions in converging to the optimal decisions, while reducing decision space and improving time complexity.

In pursuit of a more sustainable and cost-efficient last mile, parcel lockers have gained a firm foothold in the parcel delivery landscape. To fully exploit their potential and simultaneously ensure customer satisfaction, successful management of the locker's limited capacity is crucial. This is challenging as future delivery requests and pickup times are stochastic from the provider's perspective. In response, we propose to dynamically control whether the locker is presented as an available delivery option to each incoming customer with the goal of maximizing the number of served requests weighted by their priority. Additionally, we take different compartment sizes into account, which entails a second type of decision as parcels scheduled for delivery must be allocated. We formalize the problem as an infinite-horizon sequential decision problem and find that exact methods are intractable due to the curses of dimensionality. In light of this, we develop a solution framework that orchestrates multiple algorithmic techniques rooted in Sequential Decision Analytics and Reinforcement Learning, namely cost function approximation and an offline trained parametric value function approximation together with a truncated online rollout. Our innovative approach to combine these techniques enables us to address the strong interrelations between the two decision types. As a general methodological contribution, we enhance the training of our value function approximation with a modified version of experience replay that enforces structure in the value function. Our computational study shows that our method outperforms a myopic benchmark by 13.7% and an industry-inspired policy by 12.6%.

Split learning (SL) is a promising approach for training artificial intelligence (AI) models, in which devices collaborate with a server to train an AI model in a distributed manner, based on a same fixed split point. However, due to the device heterogeneity and variation of channel conditions, this way is not optimal in training delay and energy consumption. In this paper, we design an adaptive split learning (ASL) scheme which can dynamically select split points for devices and allocate computing resource for the server in wireless edge networks. We formulate an optimization problem to minimize the average training latency subject to long-term energy consumption constraint. The difficulties in solving this problem are the lack of future information and mixed integer programming (MIP). To solve it, we propose an online algorithm leveraging the Lyapunov theory, named OPEN, which decomposes it into a new MIP problem only with the current information. Then, a two-layer optimization method is proposed to solve the MIP problem. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the ASL scheme can reduce the average training delay and energy consumption by 53.7% and 22.1%, respectively, as compared to the existing SL schemes.

The Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) technology has emerged as a promising solution for network operators, providing them with an open and favorable environment. Ensuring effective coordination of x-applications (xAPPs) is crucial to enhance flexibility and optimize network performance within the O-RAN. In this paper, we introduce an innovative approach to the resource allocation problem, aiming to coordinate multiple independent xAPPs for network slicing and resource allocation in O-RAN. Our proposed method focuses on maximizing the weighted throughput among user equipments (UE), as well as allocating physical resource blocks (PRBs). We prioritize two service types, namely enhanced Mobile Broadband and Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication. To achieve this, we have designed two xAPPs: a power control xAPP for each UE and a PRB allocation xAPP. The proposed method consists of a two-part training phase, where the first part uses supervised learning with a Variational Autoencoder trained to regress the power transmission as well as the user association and PRB allocation decisions, and the second part uses unsupervised learning with a contrastive loss approach to improve the generalization and robustness of the model. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method by comparing its results to those obtained from an exhaustive search algorithm, deep Q-network algorithm, and by reporting performance metrics for the regression task. We also evaluate the proposed model's performance in different scenarios among the service types. The results show that the proposed method is a more efficient and effective solution for network slicing problems compared to state-of-the-art methods.

An experiment in which two people play a modified version of Tetris – the 40-year-old block-stacking video game – revealed that players who get fewer turns perceive the other player as less likable, regardless of whether a person or an algorithm allocates the turns. "We expected that people working in a team would care if they are treated unfairly by another human or an AI," said Malte Jung, associate professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, whose group conducted the study. Most studies on algorithmic fairness focus on the algorithm or the decision itself, but Jung sought to explore the relationships among the people affected by the decisions. "We are starting to see a lot of situations in which AI makes decisions on how resources should be distributed among people," Jung said. "We want to understand how that influences the way people perceive one another and behave towards each other. We see more and more evidence that machines mess with the way we interact with each other."