Shortest Path

Find the cheapest path from the top-left to the bottom-right of a grid graph: edge costs are unknown and must be predicted from instance features.

using DecisionFocusedLearningBenchmarks
using Plots

b = FixedSizeShortestPathBenchmark()

FixedSizeShortestPathBenchmark(grid_size=(5, 5), p=5, deg=1, ν=0.0)

Observable input

At inference time the decision-maker observes the feature vector x and the fixed grid structure (source top-left, sink bottom-right):

dataset = generate_dataset(b, 50; seed=0)
sample = first(dataset)
plot_context(b, sample)

A training sample

Each sample is a labeled triple (x, θ, y):

• x: instance feature vector (observable at train and test time)
• θ: true edge costs (training supervision only, hidden at test time)
• y: path indicator vector (y[e] = 1 if edge e is on the optimal path)

Top: feature vector x. Bottom left: edge costs θ. Bottom right: optimal path y (white dots):

plot_sample(b, sample)

Untrained policy

A DFL policy chains two components: a statistical model predicting edge costs:

model = generate_statistical_model(b)     # linear map: features → predicted edge costs

Dense(5 => 40)      # 240 parameters

and a maximizer finding the shortest path given those costs:

maximizer = generate_maximizer(b)         # Dijkstra shortest path on the grid graph

(::DecisionFocusedLearningBenchmarks.FixedSizeShortestPath.var"#shortest_path_maximizer#10"{DecisionFocusedLearningBenchmarks.FixedSizeShortestPath.var"#shortest_path_maximizer#5#11"{typeof(Graphs.dijkstra_shortest_paths), Vector{Int64}, Vector{Int64}, Int64, Int64, Graphs.SimpleGraphs.SimpleDiGraph{Int64}}}) (generic function with 1 method)

A randomly initialized policy predicts arbitrary costs, yielding a near-straight path:

θ_pred = model(sample.x)
y_pred = maximizer(θ_pred)
plot_sample(b, DataSample(sample; θ=θ_pred, y=y_pred))

Optimality gap on the dataset (lower is better):

compute_gap(b, dataset, model, maximizer)

0.07827091f0

Problem Description

A fixed-size grid shortest path problem. The graph is a directed acyclic grid of size $(\text{rows} \times \text{cols})$, with edges pointing right and downward. Edge costs $\theta \in \mathbb{R}^E$ are unknown; only a feature vector $x \in \mathbb{R}^p$ is observed. The task is to find the minimum-cost path from vertex 1 (top-left) to vertex $V$ (bottom-right):

\[y^* = \mathop{\mathrm{argmax}}\limits_{y \in \mathcal{P}} \; -\theta^\top y\]

where $y \in \{0,1\}^E$ indicates selected edges and $\mathcal{P}$ is the set of valid source-to-sink paths.

Data is generated following the process in Mandi et al., 2023.

Key Parameters

DFL Policy

\[\xrightarrow[\text{Features}]{x \in \mathbb{R}^p} \fbox{Linear model} \xrightarrow[\text{Predicted costs}]{\theta \in \mathbb{R}^E} \fbox{Dijkstra / Bellman-Ford} \xrightarrow[\text{Path}]{y \in \{0,1\}^E}\]

Model: Chain(Dense(p → E)): predicts one cost per edge.

Maximizer: Dijkstra (default) or Bellman-Ford on negated weights to find the longest (maximum-weight) path.

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