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Poster
Customizing ML Predictions for Online Algorithms
Keerti Anand · Rong Ge · Debmalya Panigrahi

Tue Jul 14 07:00 AM -- 07:45 AM & Tue Jul 14 07:00 PM -- 07:45 PM (PDT) @

A popular line of recent research incorporates ML advice in the design of online algorithms to improve their performance in typical instances. These papers treat the ML algorithm as a black-box, and redesign online algorithms to take advantage of ML predictions. In this paper, we ask the complementary question: can we redesign ML algorithms to provide better predictions for online algorithms? We explore this question in the context of the classic rent-or-buy problem, and show that incorporating optimization benchmarks in ML loss functions leads to significantly better performance, while maintaining a worst-case adversarial result when the advice is completely wrong. We support this finding both through theoretical bounds and numerical simulations.

Author Information

Keerti Anand (Duke University)
Rong Ge (Duke University)
Debmalya Panigrahi (Duke University)

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