Learned Prioritization for Trading Off Accuracy and Speed

Users want inference to be both fast and accurate, but quality often comes at the cost of speed. The field has experimented with approximate inference algorithms that make different speed-accuracy tradeoffs (for particular problems and datasets). We aim to explore this space automatically, focusing here on the case of agenda-based syntactic parsing [12]. Unfortunately, off-the-shelf reinforcement learning techniques fail to learn good policies: the state space is simply too large to explore naively. An attempt to counteract this by applying imitation learning algorithms also fails: the “teacher” follows a far better policy than anything in our learner’s policy space, free of the speed-accuracy tradeoff that arises when oracle information is unavailable, and thus largely insensitive to the known reward functfion. We propose a hybrid reinforcement/apprenticeship learning algorithm that learns to speed up an initial policy, trading off accuracy for speed according to various settings of a speed term in the loss function.