This paper explores the potential of Lagrangian duality for learning applications that feature complex constraints. Such constraints arise in many science and engineering domains, where the task amounts to learning optimization problems which must be solved repeatedly and include hard physical and operational constraints. The paper also considers applications where the learning task must enforce constraints on the predictor itself, either because they are natural properties of the function to learn or because it is desirable from a societal standpoint to impose them. This paper demonstrates experimentally that Lagrangian duality brings significant benefits for these applications. In energy domains, the combination of Lagrangian duality and deep learning can be used to obtain state-of-the-art results to predict optimal power flows, in energy systems, and optimal compressor settings, in gas networks. In transprecision computing, Lagrangian duality can complement deep learning to impose monotonicity constraints on the predictor without sacrificing accuracy. Finally, Lagrangian duality can be used to enforce fairness constraints on a predictor and obtain state-of-the-art results when minimizing disparate treatments.
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