AutoCoreset: An Automatic Practical Coreset Construction Framework
Authors: Alaa Maalouf, Murad Tukan, Vladimir Braverman, Daniela Rus

A coreset is a small weighted subset of an input set that approximates its loss function, for a given set of queries. Coresets became prevalent in machine learning as they have shown to be advantageous for many applications. Unfortunately, coresets are constructed in a problem-dependent manner, where for each problem, a new coreset construction algorithm is suggested, taking years to prove its correctness. Even the generic frameworks require additional (problem-dependent) computations or proofs to be done by the user. Besides, many problems do not have (provable) small coresets, limiting their applicability. To this end, we suggest an automatic practical framework for constructing coresets, which requires (only) the input data and the desired cost function from the user, without the need for any other task-related computation to be done by the user. To do so, we reduce the problem of approximating a loss function to an instance of vector summation approximation, where the vectors we aim to sum are loss vectors of a specific subset of the queries, such that we aim to approximate the image of the function on this subset. We show that while this set is limited, the coreset is quite general. An extensive experimental study on various machine learning applications is also conducted. Finally, we provide a “plug and play" style implementation, proposing a user-friendly system that can be easily used to apply coresets for many problems. We believe that these contributions enable future research and easier use and applications of coresets.