Poster
Binary Search Tree with Distributional Predictions
Michael Dinitz · Sungjin Im · Thomas Lavastida · Ben Moseley · Aidin Niaparast · Sergei Vassilvitskii
West Ballroom A-D #5810
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Abstract
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Thu 12 Dec 11 a.m. PST
— 2 p.m. PST
Abstract:
Algorithms with (machine-learned) predictions is a powerful framework for combining traditional worst-case algorithms with modern machine learning. However, the vast majority of work in this space assumes that the prediction itself is non-probabilistic, even if it is generated by some stochastic process (such as a machine learning system). This is a poor fit for modern ML, particularly modern neural networks, which naturally generate a *distribution*. We initiate the study of algorithms with *distributional* predictions, where the prediction itself is a distribution. We focus on one of the simplest yet fundamental settings: binary search trees (or searching a sorted array). This setting has one of the simplest algorithms with a point prediction, but what happens if the prediction is a distribution? We show that this is a richer setting: there are simple distributions where using the classical prediction-based algorithm with any single prediction does poorly. Motivated by this, as our main result, we give an algorithm with query running time $O(H(p) + \log \eta)$, where $H(p)$ is the entropy of the true distribution $p$ and $\eta$ is the Earth Mover's distance between $p$ and the predicted distribution $\hat p$. We complement this with a lower bound showing that this running time is essentially optimal (up to constants), and experiments validating the practical usefulness of our algorithm.
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