{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/automatic-cost-function-learning-with","title":"Learning Interpretable Error Functions for Combinatorial Optimization Problem Modeling","arxiv_id":"2002.09811","date":"2020-02-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Florian Richoux","Jean-François Baffier"],"abstract":"In Constraint Programming, constraints are usually represented as predicates allowing or forbidding combinations of values. However, some algorithms exploit a finer representation: error functions. Their usage comes with a price though: it makes problem modeling significantly harder. Here, we propose a method to automatically learn an error function corresponding to a constraint, given a function deciding if assignments are valid or not. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to automatically learn error functions for hard constraints. Our method uses a variant of neural networks we named Interpretable Compositional Networks, allowing us to get interpretable results, unlike regular artificial neural networks. Experiments on 5 different constraints show that our system can learn functions that scale to high dimensions, and can learn fairly good functions over incomplete spaces.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.09811v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.09811v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"automatic-cost-function-learning-with","repo_url":"https://github.com/richoux/LearningCostFunctions","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"combinatorial-optimization","task_name":"Combinatorial Optimization"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"valid"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}