Review for NeurIPS paper: GCOMB: Learning Budget-constrained Combinatorial Algorithms over Billion-sized Graphs

Neural Information Processing Systems 

Weaknesses: The main weaknesses of the paper are that the work only uses a naïve version of the greedy algorithm rather than the faster lazy greedy algorithm, and that it seems to claim more than the results suggest without further investigation in terms of the scope of applicability, and performance improvements over the greedy algorithm. The approach seems to be specialized to selecting a set of elements for coverage-like problems and specifically submodular maximization problems which admit greedy approximation algorithms, not necessarily general set combinatorial problems as claimed (it is important to clearly and fairly articulate the claimed scope of the proposed algorithms superior performance). Additionally, the greedy algorithm empirically gives near-optimal performance in the experiments, so it would be useful to know whether this approach performs well for more difficult problems, where greedy is not almost optimal. It would be good to see performance on other more combinatorial problems or nonsubmodular set graph problems, e.g. The score supervision used to train the GCN is highly related to the marginal return that greedy would use to score nodes. In addition, the locality metric seems to directly consider the percent of neighbors of a node which are not currently covered by a partial solution, which is directly related to the coverage problems considered in this work.