2023/05/16 by Gammelli, Daniele, Harrison, James, Yang, Kaidi +3 · 2 citations
#FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #FOS: Mathematics #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Optimization and Control (math.OC) #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.09129
Optimization problems over dynamic networks have been extensively studied and widely used in the past decades to formulate numerous real-world problems. However, (1) traditional optimization-based approaches do not scale to large networks, and (2) the design of good heuristics or approximation algorithms often requires significant manual trial-and-error. In this work, we argue that data-driven strategies can automate this process and learn efficient algorithms without compromising optimality. To do so, we present network control problems through the lens of reinforcement learning and propose a graph network-based framework to handle a broad class of problems. Instead of naively computing actions over high-dimensional graph elements, e.g., edges, we propose a bi-level formulation where we (1) specify a desired next state via RL, and (2) solve a convex program to best achieve it, leading to drastically improved scalability and performance. We further highlight a collection of desirable features to system designers, investigate design decisions, and present experiments on real-world control problems showing the utility, scalability, and flexibility of our framework.