Learning-Augmented Online Scheduling with Parsimonious Preemption

Learning-augmented algorithms have emerged as a powerful paradigm to surpass traditional worst-case lower bounds by integrating potentially noisy predictions. While this framework has seen success in online scheduling, existing work primarily optimizes job latency while relying on frequent, ``blind'' preemptions. This ignores the fundamental trade-off between algorithmic performance and preemption complexity. We provide the first systematic study of learning-augmented scheduling that curbs preemption while optimizing latency. We establish that the gap between theoretical latency bounds and preemption overhead can be bridged with solid analytical foundations. Our results include O(1)-competitive algorithms for single and unrelated parallel machines with only O(1) preemptions per job under accurate predictions, with overhead scaling logarithmically with the prediction error. By providing the first bounded-preemption guarantees for unrelated and malleable machines, we extend the theoretical reach of the learning-augmented framework to more constrained and realistic settings. Finally, our algorithms are validated through experiments.