TY - GEN
T1 - Learning to optimize combinatorial functions
AU - Rosenfeld, Nir
AU - Balkanski, Eric
AU - Globerson, Amir
AU - Singer, Yaron
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 35th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2018.All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Submodular functions have become a ubiquitous tool in machine learning. They are learnable from data, and can be optimized efficiently and with guarantees. Nonetheless, recent negative results show that optimizing learned surrogates of submodular functions can result in arbitrarily bad approximations of the true optimum. Our goal in this paper is to highlight the source of this hardness, and propose an alternative criterion for optimizing general combinatorial functions from sampled data. We prove a tight equivalence showing that a class of functions is optimizable if and only if it can be learned. We provide efficient and scalable optimization algorithms for several function classes of interest, and demonstrate their utility on the task of optimally choosing trending social media items.
AB - Submodular functions have become a ubiquitous tool in machine learning. They are learnable from data, and can be optimized efficiently and with guarantees. Nonetheless, recent negative results show that optimizing learned surrogates of submodular functions can result in arbitrarily bad approximations of the true optimum. Our goal in this paper is to highlight the source of this hardness, and propose an alternative criterion for optimizing general combinatorial functions from sampled data. We prove a tight equivalence showing that a class of functions is optimizable if and only if it can be learned. We provide efficient and scalable optimization algorithms for several function classes of interest, and demonstrate their utility on the task of optimally choosing trending social media items.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85057319849&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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AN - SCOPUS:85057319849
T3 - 35th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2018
SP - 6955
EP - 6964
BT - 35th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2018
A2 - Krause, Andreas
A2 - Dy, Jennifer
PB - International Machine Learning Society (IMLS)
T2 - 35th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2018
Y2 - 10 July 2018 through 15 July 2018
ER -