Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pareto Front

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 116 posts

Re: Pareto Front

#21

Post by CodeIsTheEnd »

I am training for a marathon, and, as I increase both by distance and pace, I am always excited when I have a "Pareto run": a run along the Pareto frontier of me trying to maximize distance and speed.

When explaining it to some coworkers, I stumbled on a fairly intuitive explanation: "I've run farther before, and I've run faster before, but I've never run _this_ far, _this fast."

There was some pushback about why not just call it a PR (personal record), but I would only use that term for fixed distances (1mi, 5k, 10k, etc.) or a consistent route that I've run many times before. Nobody would say "I set my 7.40 mile PR today." More importantly, it misses the comparison to all farther (and faster) runs—it's not exciting to set a 5k PR just because you've barely run that distance before, and the pace is actually slower that a 10k you've done.

(Had a Pareto run of 7.40 miles @ 6:28/mi last week!)

Re: Pareto Front

#22

Post by vavikk »

Nice, this is exactly what I use for the multi-objective optimizer on a quantum network simulator I'm building — scoring topologies on fidelity/latency/success rate tradeoffs.

Re: Pareto Front

#23

Post by trash_cat »

miyuru wrote: post #16
denismenace wrote: post #6

I'm assuming you must have discovered this through the OpenRouter LLM performance graphs.

artificialanalysis for me. https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence-comparison-tabs

I think the one from hugging face is much clearer, albeit its an arena metric and a bit tricky to find the pareto view. Look for the the top Navigation Bar (Agent Chat Code Image Video). Chat -> (dropdown) Text -> (Side panel) View as Pareto.

https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/arena-leaderboard

Re: Pareto Front

#24

Post by Aachen »

airstrike wrote: post #19
Aachen wrote: post #3

Misread the title and got excited about a Pareto font, that is, the best possible font (presumably: distinct l/I, O/0, scores within error margins of the top readability and reading speed scores, widely available, etc.) Maybe in vein but did anyone already figure this one out? The closest I got was PT sans, open-licensed commissioned by the Russian ministry for communication (I found it surprising that a country that…

Inter with optional open type features turned on? https://rsms.me/inter/

I didn't know fonts can have options. Another learning curve on how to enable that in Latex/Html/Libreoffice/anywhere else I use fonts ^^'. But still helpful to know about!

ss02 disambiguation seems to be the one I'd be wanting to turn on, with tnum for monospace numbers being a good option as well that I hadn't even realised I wanted from a font!

Re: Pareto Front

#25

Post by orthoxerox »

gadders wrote: post #20
Aachen wrote: post #3

Misread the title and got excited about a Pareto font, that is, the best possible font (presumably: distinct l/I, O/0, scores within error margins of the top readability and reading speed scores, widely available, etc.) Maybe in vein but did anyone already figure this one out? The closest I got was PT sans, open-licensed commissioned by the Russian ministry for communication (I found it surprising that a country that…

I thought it was some sort of Italian activism group. "The Pareto Front today claimed responsiblity for...."

...20% of the attacks causing 80% of the casualties?

Re: Pareto Front

#26

Post by matsemann »

vavikk wrote: post #22

Nice, this is exactly what I use for the multi-objective optimizer on a quantum network simulator I'm building — scoring topologies on fidelity/latency/success rate tradeoffs.

My thesis many years ago was on multi-objective optimization using evolutionary algorithms (in my profile), and maintaining a wide pareto front was what most algorithms (like NSGA-II) were attempting. If all individuals cluster around a small area (in for instance a weight/strength tradeoff), you will quickly get stuck. So should select solutions to keep for further search along the whole front (for instance some solution that is very strong but unfortunately also very heavy). Maybe keep some of them as candidates even if worse (not part of the pareto front), just to keep that part of the search space alive and avoid local optima.

Of course, what's hard anyways when you have a good set of solutions that are pareto optimal, is to then choose between them. Especially as the dimensions (objectives) grow. In my example we can end up with many variants of strength/weight trade-offs that each are optimal, which one to choose?

Re: Pareto Front

#28

Post by bob1029 »

Pareto front sounds like an interesting way to optimize, but it suffers from the curse of dimensionality just like anything else.

As the number of objectives (dimensions) increases, the number of samples you need to cover the frontier increases exponentially. You will very rarely find solutions that actually dominate other solutions in many practical optimization scenarios. With 2 dimensions you have a 25% chance of domination. With 10 dimensions it's a .098% chance.

The most useful cases I've seen tend to occur where we just optimize for two things at once. The chances of domination are high, it's easy to visualize and very efficient to implement. As we get into higher dimensional spaces, things get weird really fast.

Re: Pareto Front

#29

Post by jrrv »

Lerc wrote: post #13
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, prioritization. It’s really that simple. Eschew obfuscation.

Almost the complete opposite of prioritisation. The Pareto points are where you sacrifice the least of anything to get the most of everything. There's the saying about buying computers. Good, Cheap, Fast, pick any two. That's where you would prioritise. If someone makes something that better, cheaper, and faster, or even pretty close to the best on two of those and clearly better on the other. It's a Pareto point. Ov…

Given this in the TFA

> a Pareto front represents the set of solutions where no solution outperforms any other solution in the set at every objective

I do not believe you are correct when you say

> something that better, cheaper, and faster, or even pretty close to the best on two of those and clearly better on the other. It's a Pareto point.

Since that would outperform on every objective

GP's point that it's prioritisation does not seem incorrect to me. Prioritisation involves considering trade-offs of various approaches and deciding which aspects & attributes to optimise for, at the expense of others.

Re: Pareto Front

#30

Post by Whitespace »

I have a weightlifting spreadsheet with weight on the vertical axis and reps on the horizontal axis. The value of each cell is the estimated 1 rep max if I accomplish that lift. In theory if my e1RM is 100kg then I can lift any permutation of (weight,reps) that have the same e1RM. This is akin to knowing Pareto Frontier of my current strength.

I use conditional formatting to color cells according to the probability that I can lift them—if I lifted 50kg for 10 reps then I can definitely do 50kg for 9 reps, so that cell is green. But if e1RM(50,10) > e1RM(40,15) then I can probably do that too so it's light green. The visualization naturally becomes Pareto-like.

If I'm feeling strong I can aim for higher weight, lower reps. Or if I'm feeling weak I can close out a (weight, reps) that's below my current e1RM but I haven't accomplished yet. The end result is that I'm always "accomplishing" some sort of PR no matter how I feel.

I call this e1RM Bingo.

Post reply on HN