Learning to Select Cutting Planes in Mixed Integer Linear Programming Solving

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Xuefeng, Chen, Liangyu, Yang, Zhengfeng, Zeng, Zhenbing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Zhang, Xuefeng
Chen, Liangyu
Yang, Zhengfeng
Zeng, Zhenbing
author_facet Zhang, Xuefeng
Chen, Liangyu
Yang, Zhengfeng
Zeng, Zhenbing
contents Cutting planes (cuts) are crucial for solving Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problems. Advanced MILP solvers typically rely on manually designed heuristic algorithms for cut selection, which require much expert experience and cannot be generalized for different scales of MILP problems. Therefore, learning-based methods for cut selection are considered a promising direction. State-of-the-art learning-based methods formulate cut selection as a sequence-to-sequence problem, easily handled by sequence models. However, the existing sequence models need help with the following issues: (1) the model only captures cut information while neglecting the Linear Programming (LP) relaxation; (2) the sequence model utilizes positional information of the input sequence, which may influence cut selection. To address these challenges, we design a novel learning model HGTSM for better select cuts. We encode MILP problem state as a heterogeneous tripartite graph, utilizing heterogeneous graph networks to fully capture the underlying structure of MILP problems. Simultaneously, we propose a novel sequence model whose architecture is tailored to handle inputs in different orders. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms heuristic methods and learning-based baselines on multiple challenging MILP datasets. Additionally, the model exhibits stability and the ability to generalize to different types of problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_03112
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Select Cutting Planes in Mixed Integer Linear Programming Solving
Zhang, Xuefeng
Chen, Liangyu
Yang, Zhengfeng
Zeng, Zhenbing
Optimization and Control
Cutting planes (cuts) are crucial for solving Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problems. Advanced MILP solvers typically rely on manually designed heuristic algorithms for cut selection, which require much expert experience and cannot be generalized for different scales of MILP problems. Therefore, learning-based methods for cut selection are considered a promising direction. State-of-the-art learning-based methods formulate cut selection as a sequence-to-sequence problem, easily handled by sequence models. However, the existing sequence models need help with the following issues: (1) the model only captures cut information while neglecting the Linear Programming (LP) relaxation; (2) the sequence model utilizes positional information of the input sequence, which may influence cut selection. To address these challenges, we design a novel learning model HGTSM for better select cuts. We encode MILP problem state as a heterogeneous tripartite graph, utilizing heterogeneous graph networks to fully capture the underlying structure of MILP problems. Simultaneously, we propose a novel sequence model whose architecture is tailored to handle inputs in different orders. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms heuristic methods and learning-based baselines on multiple challenging MILP datasets. Additionally, the model exhibits stability and the ability to generalize to different types of problems.
title Learning to Select Cutting Planes in Mixed Integer Linear Programming Solving
topic Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03112