Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

Decision-Focused Learning with Directional Gradients

Michael Huang · Vishal Gupta

West Ballroom A-D #6107
[ ]
Wed 11 Dec 4:30 p.m. PST — 7:30 p.m. PST

Abstract:

We propose a novel family of decision-aware surrogate losses, called Perturbation Gradient (PG) losses, for the predict-then-optimize framework. These losses directly approximate the downstream decision loss and can be optimized using off-the-shelf gradient-based methods. Importantly, unlike existing surrogate losses, the approximation error of our PG losses vanishes as the number of samples grows. This implies that optimizing our surrogate loss yields a best-in-class policy asymptotically, even in misspecified settings. This is the first such result in misspecified settings and we provide numerical evidence confirming our PG losses substantively outperform existing proposals when the underlying model is misspecified and the noise is not centrally symmetric. Insofar as misspecification is commonplace in practice -- especially when we might prefer a simpler, more interpretable model -- PG losses offer a novel, theoretically justified, method for computationally tractable decision-aware learning.

Live content is unavailable. Log in and register to view live content