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A Mixed-Integer Programming Approach to Training Dense Neural Networks

Machine Learning 2022-06-27 v2 Optimization and Control

Abstract

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are prevalent machine learning models that are applied across various real-world classification tasks. However, training ANNs is time-consuming and the resulting models take a lot of memory to deploy. In order to train more parsimonious ANNs, we propose a novel mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulation for training fully-connected ANNs. Our formulations can account for both binary and rectified linear unit (ReLU) activations, and for the use of a log-likelihood loss. We present numerical experiments comparing our MIP-based methods against existing approaches and show that we are able to achieve competitive out-of-sample performance with more parsimonious models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.00723,
  title  = {A Mixed-Integer Programming Approach to Training Dense Neural Networks},
  author = {Vrishabh Patil and Yonatan Mintz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.00723},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

25 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-24T08:38:47.846Z