Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Tianhao, Pu, Shanwen, Ge, Dongdong, Ye, Yinyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08171
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916215862067200
author Liu, Tianhao
Pu, Shanwen
Ge, Dongdong
Ye, Yinyu
author_facet Liu, Tianhao
Pu, Shanwen
Ge, Dongdong
Ye, Yinyu
contents Linear programming has been practically solved mainly by simplex and interior point methods. Compared with the weakly polynomial complexity obtained by the interior point methods, the existence of strongly polynomial bounds for the length of the pivot path generated by the simplex methods remains a mystery. In this paper, we propose two novel pivot experts that leverage both global and local information of the linear programming instances for the primal simplex method and show their excellent performance numerically. The experts can be regarded as a benchmark to evaluate the performance of classical pivot rules, although they are hard to directly implement. To tackle this challenge, we employ a graph convolutional neural network model, trained via imitation learning, to mimic the behavior of the pivot expert. Our pivot rule, learned empirically, displays a significant advantage over conventional methods in various linear programming problems, as demonstrated through a series of rigorous experiments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_08171
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Pivot as a Smart Expert
Liu, Tianhao
Pu, Shanwen
Ge, Dongdong
Ye, Yinyu
Optimization and Control
Linear programming has been practically solved mainly by simplex and interior point methods. Compared with the weakly polynomial complexity obtained by the interior point methods, the existence of strongly polynomial bounds for the length of the pivot path generated by the simplex methods remains a mystery. In this paper, we propose two novel pivot experts that leverage both global and local information of the linear programming instances for the primal simplex method and show their excellent performance numerically. The experts can be regarded as a benchmark to evaluate the performance of classical pivot rules, although they are hard to directly implement. To tackle this challenge, we employ a graph convolutional neural network model, trained via imitation learning, to mimic the behavior of the pivot expert. Our pivot rule, learned empirically, displays a significant advantage over conventional methods in various linear programming problems, as demonstrated through a series of rigorous experiments.
title Learning to Pivot as a Smart Expert
topic Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08171