  The widespread adoption of deep learning is often attributed to its automatic
feature construction with minimal inductive bias. However, in many real-world
tasks, the learned function is intended to satisfy domain-specific constraints.
We focus on monotonicity constraints, which are common and require that the
function's output increases with increasing values of specific input features.
We develop a counterexample-guided technique to provably enforce monotonicity
constraints at prediction time. Additionally, we propose a technique to use
monotonicity as an inductive bias for deep learning. It works by iteratively
incorporating monotonicity counterexamples in the learning process. Contrary to
prior work in monotonic learning, we target general ReLU neural networks and do
not further restrict the hypothesis space. We have implemented these techniques
in a tool called COMET. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our
approach achieves state-of-the-art results compared to existing monotonic
learners, and can improve the model quality compared to those that were trained
without taking monotonicity constraints into account.
