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Title: Comparative Synthesis: Learning Near-Optimal Network Designs by Query
When managing wide-area networks, network architects must decide how to balance multiple conflicting metrics, and ensure fair allocations to competing traffic while prioritizing critical traffic. The state of practice poses challenges since architects must precisely encode their intent into formal optimization models using abstract notions such as utility functions, and ad-hoc manually tuned knobs. In this paper, we present the first effort to synthesize optimal network designs with indeterminate objectives using an interactive program-synthesis-based approach. We make three contributions. First, we present comparative synthesis, an interactive synthesis framework which produces near-optimal programs (network designs) through two kinds of queries (Validate and Compare), without an objective explicitly given. Second, we develop the first learning algorithm for comparative synthesis in which a voting-guided learner picks the most informative query in each iteration. We present theoretical analysis of the convergence rate of the algorithm. Third, we implemented Net10Q, a system based on our approach, and demonstrate its effectiveness on four real-world network case studies using black-box oracles and simulation experiments, as well as a pilot user study comprising network researchers and practitioners. Both theoretical and experimental results show the promise of our approach.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1837023 2046071
NSF-PAR ID:
10398333
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Volume:
7
Issue:
POPL
ISSN:
2475-1421
Page Range / eLocation ID:
91 to 120
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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