Learning to Stop Cut Generation for Efficient Mixed-Integer Linear Programming

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Ling, Haotian, Wang, Zhihai, Wang, Jie
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866909090646589440
author Ling, Haotian
Wang, Zhihai
Wang, Jie
author_facet Ling, Haotian
Wang, Zhihai
Wang, Jie
contents Cutting planes (cuts) play an important role in solving mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs), as they significantly tighten the dual bounds and improve the solving performance. A key problem for cuts is when to stop cuts generation, which is important for the efficiency of solving MILPs. However, many modern MILP solvers employ hard-coded heuristics to tackle this problem, which tends to neglect underlying patterns among MILPs from certain applications. To address this challenge, we formulate the cuts generation stopping problem as a reinforcement learning problem and propose a novel hybrid graph representation model (HYGRO) to learn effective stopping strategies. An appealing feature of HYGRO is that it can effectively capture both the dynamic and static features of MILPs, enabling dynamic decision-making for the stopping strategies. To the best of our knowledge, HYGRO is the first data-driven method to tackle the cuts generation stopping problem. By integrating our approach with modern solvers, experiments demonstrate that HYGRO significantly improves the efficiency of solving MILPs compared to competitive baselines, achieving up to 31% improvement.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_17527
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Stop Cut Generation for Efficient Mixed-Integer Linear Programming
Ling, Haotian
Wang, Zhihai
Wang, Jie
Artificial Intelligence
Cutting planes (cuts) play an important role in solving mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs), as they significantly tighten the dual bounds and improve the solving performance. A key problem for cuts is when to stop cuts generation, which is important for the efficiency of solving MILPs. However, many modern MILP solvers employ hard-coded heuristics to tackle this problem, which tends to neglect underlying patterns among MILPs from certain applications. To address this challenge, we formulate the cuts generation stopping problem as a reinforcement learning problem and propose a novel hybrid graph representation model (HYGRO) to learn effective stopping strategies. An appealing feature of HYGRO is that it can effectively capture both the dynamic and static features of MILPs, enabling dynamic decision-making for the stopping strategies. To the best of our knowledge, HYGRO is the first data-driven method to tackle the cuts generation stopping problem. By integrating our approach with modern solvers, experiments demonstrate that HYGRO significantly improves the efficiency of solving MILPs compared to competitive baselines, achieving up to 31% improvement.
title Learning to Stop Cut Generation for Efficient Mixed-Integer Linear Programming
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.17527