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Improving Online Algorithms via ML Predictions

Manish Purohit,Zoya Svitkina,Ravi Kumar

2024 · DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2407.17712
Neural Information Processing Systems · 406 Citations

TLDR

This work considers two classical problems, ski rental and non-clairvoyant job scheduling, and obtains new online algorithms that use predictions to make their decisions that are oblivious to the performance of the predictor, improve with better predictions, but do not degrade much if the predictions are poor.

Abstract

In this work we study the problem of using machine-learned predictions to improve performance of online algorithms. We consider two classical problems, ski rental and non-clairvoyant job scheduling, and obtain new online algorithms that use predictions to make their decisions. These algorithms are oblivious to the performance of the predictor, improve with better predictions, but do not degrade much if the predictions are poor.