Abstract

In their seminal paper that initiated the field of algorithmic mechanism design, Nisan and Ronen [Noam Nisan and Amir Ronen, 1999] studied the problem of designing strategyproof mechanisms for scheduling jobs on unrelated machines aiming to minimize the makespan. They provided a strategyproof mechanism that achieves an n-approximation and they made the bold conjecture that this is the best approximation achievable by any deterministic strategyproof scheduling mechanism. After more than two decades and several efforts, n remains the best known approximation and very recent work by Christodoulou et al. [George Christodoulou et al., 2021] has been able to prove an Ω(√n) approximation lower bound for all deterministic strategyproof mechanisms. This strong negative result, however, heavily depends on the fact that the performance of these mechanisms is evaluated using worst-case analysis. To overcome such overly pessimistic, and often uninformative, worst-case bounds, a surge of recent work has focused on the "learning-augmented framework", whose goal is to leverage machine-learned predictions to obtain improved approximations when these predictions are accurate (consistency), while also achieving near-optimal worst-case approximations even when the predictions are arbitrarily wrong (robustness).
In this work, we study the classic strategic scheduling problem of Nisan and Ronen [Noam Nisan and Amir Ronen, 1999] using the learning-augmented framework and give a deterministic polynomial-time strategyproof mechanism that is 6-consistent and 2n-robust. We thus achieve the "best of both worlds": an O(1) consistency and an O(n) robustness that asymptotically matches the best-known approximation. We then extend this result to provide more general worst-case approximation guarantees as a function of the prediction error. Finally, we complement our positive results by showing that any 1-consistent deterministic strategyproof mechanism has unbounded robustness.

@InProceedings{balkanski_et_al:LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.11,
  author =	{Balkanski, Eric and Gkatzelis, Vasilis and Tan, Xizhi},
  title =	{{Strategyproof Scheduling with Predictions}},
  booktitle =	{14th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2023)},
  pages =	{11:1--11:22},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-263-1},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{251},
  editor =	{Tauman Kalai, Yael},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2023/17514},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-175143},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.11},
  annote =	{Keywords: Mechanism Design with Predictions, Strategyproof Scheduling}
}