Learning Policies for Contextual Submodular Prediction
This addresses prediction challenges in domains like ad placement and summarization, offering a data-efficient solution with performance guarantees, though it builds incrementally on existing online submodular optimization methods.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting sets or lists with submodular reward functions, proposing a no-regret learning approach that is provably near-optimal and efficient, validated through experiments on tasks like trajectory optimization and recommendation.
Many prediction domains, such as ad placement, recommendation, trajectory prediction, and document summarization, require predicting a set or list of options. Such lists are often evaluated using submodular reward functions that measure both quality and diversity. We propose a simple, efficient, and provably near-optimal approach to optimizing such prediction problems based on no-regret learning. Our method leverages a surprising result from online submodular optimization: a single no-regret online learner can compete with an optimal sequence of predictions. Compared to previous work, which either learn a sequence of classifiers or rely on stronger assumptions such as realizability, we ensure both data-efficiency as well as performance guarantees in the fully agnostic setting. Experiments validate the efficiency and applicability of the approach on a wide range of problems including manipulator trajectory optimization, news recommendation and document summarization.