arXiv:2507.00851cs.LG2025-07

让机器学习模型提前考虑自身决策对结果的影响,提升实际应用效果。

Aligning Learning and Endogenous Decision-Making

  • 构建端到端框架,使模型在训练时就预知自身预测如何影响后续决策。
  • 提出鲁棒优化方法,在模型不确定时仍能保证近优决策,理论有保障。
  • 适用于定价、推荐等需权衡信息获取与决策的场景,适合工业界落地应用。

我们观察到的许多数据都受自身决策影响——例如商品销量受定价影响,线上结账选择受商品组合影响。在此类内生不确定性下,缺乏反事实信息,需主动学习。本文提出一种端到端方法,让机器学习模型在训练阶段就意识到其预测将影响下游决策,从而更有效地参与决策过程。进一步引入鲁棒优化变体,通过构建模型空间的不确定性集,优化策略以抵御最坏预测情况。理论证明该方法在数据量充足时可高概率捕捉近最优决策。此外,我们首次将一类新型两阶段随机优化问题纳入该框架:第一阶段决定采集哪些随机变量的信息,第二阶段基于所得信息做决策。实验涵盖定价与库存推荐问题,对比在线学习、强化学习等方法,本方法表现持续更优。值得注意的是,即使第一阶段决策不改变随机变量本身,仍会影响应作出的准确预测点,体现了决策闭环的重要性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Many of the observations we make are biased by our decisions. For instance, the demand of items is impacted by the prices set, and online checkout choices are influenced by the assortments presented. The challenge in decision-making under this setting is the lack of counterfactual information, and the need to learn it instead. We introduce an end-to-end method under endogenous uncertainty to train ML models to be aware of their downstream, enabling their effective use in the decision-making stage. We further introduce a robust optimization variant that accounts for uncertainty in ML models -- specifically by constructing uncertainty sets over the space of ML models and optimizing actions to protect against worst-case predictions. We prove guarantees that this robust approach can capture near-optimal decisions with high probability as a function of data. Besides this, we also introduce a new class of two-stage stochastic optimization problems to the end-to-end learning framework that can now be addressed through our framework. Here, the first stage is an information-gathering problem to decide which random variable to poll and gain information about before making a second-stage decision based off of it. We present several computational experiments for pricing and inventory assortment/recommendation problems. We compare against existing methods in online learning/bandits/offline reinforcement learning and show our approach has consistent improved performance over these. Just as in the endogenous setting, the model's prediction also depends on the first-stage decision made. While this decision does not affect the random variable in this setting, it does affect the correct point forecast that should be made.

决策优化机器学习鲁棒性内生性

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