Learning-Augmented Algorithms for Online Concave Packing and Convex Covering Problems

Learning-augmented algorithms have been extensively studied in the computer science community recently, particularly in the context of online problems, in which machine-learning predictors can help provide additional information about the future, in order to overcome classical impossibility results. Such algorithms use advice prudently to improve the performance of classical algorithms, while ensuring robustness against inaccurate advice. In this paper, we present learning-augmented algorithmic frameworks for two fundamental optimizations settings, extending and generalizing prior works. For online packing with concave objectives, we present a simple but overarching strategy that switches between the advice and the state-of-the-art online algorithm. For online covering with convex objectives, we greatly extend primal-dual methods for online convex covering programs and previous learning-augmented framework for online covering linear programs from the literature, to many new applications. We show that our algorithms break impossibility results when the advice is accurate, while maintaining comparable performance with state-of-the-art classical online algorithms even when the advice is erroneous.