Get the latest tech news
Explainable Linear Programs
Back in 2020, when I worked in the supply chain side of Google, I had a fun and impactful side project related to human-level explanations of linear programs. A linear program is a mathematical model that defines some number of variables, linear constraints, and a linear objective function. When some variables are forced to be integer (ILPs), you can solve a lot of useful problems like scheduling, routing, and packing. That’s basically how all supply chain optimization works.
Even more, to automate the process of exploring the space of changes to a model to surface insights about its sensitivity and robustness before a human thinks to ask about it. Fast forward to today, when my colleague pointed me to this 2023 paper by Microsoft researchers Beibin Li, Konstantina Mellou, Bo Zhang, Jeevan Pathuri, and Ishai Menache, “Large Language Models for Supply Chain Optimization”. You help a mass of humans in a chaotic environment convert their confusion into structured queries (with a very narrowly scoped API) and then have a deep, robust, tested classical system evaluate the query and produce a table of results that the LLM can patiently summarize in words.
Or read this on Hacker News