{"id":24278,"date":"2025-07-18T14:41:46","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T06:41:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cde.nus.edu.sg\/isem\/?p=24278"},"modified":"2026-01-27T17:39:45","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T09:39:45","slug":"efficient-budget-allocation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cde.nus.edu.sg\/isem\/2025\/07\/efficient-budget-allocation\/","title":{"rendered":"Efficient Budget Allocation for Large-Scale LLM-Enabled Virtual Screening"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2>\n\t\tISEM Seminar Series\n\t<\/h2>\n\t<table>\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td>\n<h2><strong>&#8220;Efficient Budget Allocation for Large-Scale LLM-Enabled Virtual Screening<\/strong><strong>&#8220;<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><em>by<\/em><\/p>\n<strong>Dr Zaile Li<\/strong>\n<strong>Postdoctoral Researcher<\/strong>\nHealthcare Management Initiative of INSEAD\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>24 July 2025 (Thursday), 2pm &#8211; 3.30pm<br \/>\nVenue: E1-07-21\/22 &#8211; ISEM Executive Classroom<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\t<table>\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"765\">ABSTRACT\n<p>Screening tasks that aim to identify a small subset of top alternatives from a large pool are common in business decision-making processes. These tasks often require substantial human effort to evaluate each alternative&#8217;s performance, making them time-consuming and costly. Motivated by recent advances in large language models (LLMs), particularly their ability to generate outputs that align well with human evaluations, we consider an LLM-as-human-evaluator approach for conducting screening virtually, thereby reducing the cost burden. To achieve scalability and cost-effectiveness in virtual screening, we identify that the stochastic nature of LLM outputs and their cost structure necessitate efficient budget allocation across all alternatives. To address this, we propose using a top-m greedy evaluation mechanism, a simple yet effective approach that keeps evaluating the current top-m alternatives, and design the explore-first top-m greedy (EFG-m) algorithm. We prove that EFG-m is both sample-optimal and consistent in large-scale virtual screening. Surprisingly, we also uncover a bonus ranking effect, where the algorithm naturally induces an indifference-based ranking within the selected subset. To further enhance practicality, we design a suite of algorithm variants to improve screening performance and computational efficiency. Numerical experiments validate our results and demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms. Lastly, we conduct a case study on LLM-based virtual screening. The study shows that while LLMs alone may not provide meaningful screening and ranking results when directly queried, integrating them with our sample-optimal algorithms unlocks their potential for cost-effective, large-scale virtual screening.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"765\">\nZaile Li is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Healthcare Management Initiative of INSEAD. He holds a Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering from the School of Management, Fudan University. His research focuses on data-driven selection decisions, simulation optimization, sequential learning, and generative AI, with applications in healthcare management. Zaile&#8217;s work has received several honors, including finalist in the INFORMS George Nicholson Student Paper Competition and First Prize in the 14th POMS-HK Best Student Paper Competition.\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Dr Zaile Li<\/p>\n<p>Postdoctoral Researcher<\/p>\n<p>Healthcare Management Initiative of INSEAD<\/p>\n<p>24 July 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":310,"featured_media":25083,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"set","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,1],"tags":[40],"class_list":["post-24278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-seminars","category-uncategorized","tag-professional"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cde.nus.edu.sg\/isem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cde.nus.edu.sg\/isem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cde.nus.edu.sg\/isem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cde.nus.edu.sg\/isem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/310"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cde.nus.edu.sg\/isem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24278"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cde.nus.edu.sg\/isem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25084,"href":"https:\/\/cde.nus.edu.sg\/isem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24278\/revisions\/25084"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cde.nus.edu.sg\/isem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cde.nus.edu.sg\/isem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cde.nus.edu.sg\/isem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cde.nus.edu.sg\/isem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}