Branch & Learn for Recursively and Iteratively Solvable Problems in Predict+Optimize

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022) Main Conference Track

Bibtex Paper Supplemental

Authors

Xinyi Hu, Jasper Lee, Jimmy Lee, Allen Z. Zhong

Abstract

This paper proposes Branch & Learn, a framework for Predict+Optimize to tackle optimization problems containing parameters that are unknown at the time of solving. Given an optimization problem solvable by a recursive algorithm satisfying simple conditions, we show how a corresponding learning algorithm can be constructed directly and methodically from the recursive algorithm. Our framework applies also to iterative algorithms by viewing them as a degenerate form of recursion. Extensive experimentation shows better performance for our proposal over classical and state of the art approaches.