FPO-DYS

Daniel McKenzie, Samy Wu Fung, and Howard Heaton

Summary

Operator splitting can be used to design easy-to-train models for predict-and-optimize tasks, which scale effortlessly to problems with thousands of variables.

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Key Steps

• Split polytope constraints into nonnegativity and affine constraints
• Evaluate model using three-operator splitting (with projections onto two constraint sets) for forward prop
• Backprop using JFB

Preprint Code

Abstract

In many practical settings, a combinatorial problem must be repeatedly solved with similar, but distinct parameters. Yet, the parameters $w$ are not directly observed; only contextual data $d$ that correlates with $w$ is available. It is tempting to use a neural network to predict $w$ given $d$, but training such a model requires reconciling the discrete nature of combinatorial optimization with the gradient-based frameworks used to train neural networks. One approach to overcoming this issue is to consider a continuous relaxation of the combinatorial problem. While existing such approaches have shown to be highly effective on small problems (10--100 variables) they do not scale well to large problems. In this work, we show how recent results in operator splitting can be used to design such a system which is easy to train and scales effortlessly to problems with thousands of variables.

Citation

@article{mckenzie2023faster,
         title={{Faster Predict-and-Optimize with Davis-Yin Splitting}},
         author={McKenzie, Daniel and Wu Fung, Samy and Heaton, Howard},
         journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.13395},
         year={2023}
}