Learning to Schedule Online Tasks with Bandit Feedback
This addresses scheduling challenges in cloud computing and crowdsourcing, offering a novel solution for uncertain environments, though it is incremental in combining existing methods.
The paper tackles online task scheduling with unknown reward, cost, and uncertain arrival distribution, proposing the DOL-RM algorithm that achieves a sub-linear regret of O(T^{3/4}) and outperforms baselines in cumulative reward-to-cost ratio.
Online task scheduling serves an integral role for task-intensive applications in cloud computing and crowdsourcing. Optimal scheduling can enhance system performance, typically measured by the reward-to-cost ratio, under some task arrival distribution. On one hand, both reward and cost are dependent on task context (e.g., evaluation metric) and remain black-box in practice. These render reward and cost hard to model thus unknown before decision making. On the other hand, task arrival behaviors remain sensitive to factors like unpredictable system fluctuation whereby a prior estimation or the conventional assumption of arrival distribution (e.g., Poisson) may fail. This implies another practical yet often neglected challenge, i.e., uncertain task arrival distribution. Towards effective scheduling under a stationary environment with various uncertainties, we propose a double-optimistic learning based Robbins-Monro (DOL-RM) algorithm. Specifically, DOL-RM integrates a learning module that incorporates optimistic estimation for reward-to-cost ratio and a decision module that utilizes the Robbins-Monro method to implicitly learn task arrival distribution while making scheduling decisions. Theoretically, DOL-RM achieves convergence gap and no regret learning with a sub-linear regret of $O(T^{3/4})$, which is the first result for online task scheduling under uncertain task arrival distribution and unknown reward and cost. Our numerical results in a synthetic experiment and a real-world application demonstrate the effectiveness of DOL-RM in achieving the best cumulative reward-to-cost ratio compared with other state-of-the-art baselines.