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Over the last few years, there has been a surge in the use of learning techniques to improve the performance of optimization algorithms. In particular, the learning of branching rules in mixed integer linear programming has received a lot…

This paper presents a novel approach to neural network pruning by integrating a graph-based observation space into an AutoML framework to address the limitations of existing methods. Traditional pruning approaches often depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Dieter Balemans , Thomas Huybrechts , Jan Steckel , Siegfried Mercelis

Mixed integer linear programs are commonly solved by Branch and Bound algorithms. A key factor of the efficiency of the most successful commercial solvers is their fine-tuned heuristics. In this paper, we leverage patterns in real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Marc Etheve , Zacharie Alès , Côme Bissuel , Olivier Juan , Safia Kedad-Sidhoum

Combinatorial optimization problems near algorithmic phase transitions represent a fundamental challenge for both classical algorithms and machine learning approaches. Among them, graph coloring stands as a prototypical constraint…

We present a learning-based approach to computing solutions for certain NP-hard problems. Our approach combines deep learning techniques with useful algorithmic elements from classic heuristics. The central component is a graph…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-26 Zhuwen Li , Qifeng Chen , Vladlen Koltun

A big challenge in branch and bound lies in identifying the optimal node within the search tree from which to proceed. Current state-of-the-art selectors utilize either hand-crafted ensembles that automatically switch between naive sub-node…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Alexander Mattick , Christopher Mutschler

While much of the work in the design of convolutional networks over the last five years has revolved around the empirical investigation of the importance of depth, filter sizes, and number of feature channels, recent studies have shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-08 Karim Ahmed , Lorenzo Torresani

The selection of branching variables is a key component of branch-and-bound algorithms for solving Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) problems since the quality of the selection procedure is likely to have a significant effect on the size of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-08-23 Pierre Le Bodic , George L. Nemhauser

A common problem of classical neural network architectures is that additional information or expert knowledge cannot be naturally integrated into the learning process. To overcome this limitation, we propose a two-step approach consisting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-17 Florian Seiffarth

Neural Combinatorial Optimization aims to learn to solve a class of combinatorial problems through data-driven methods and notably through employing neural networks by learning the underlying distribution of problem instances. While, so far…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Daniela Thyssens , Tim Dernedde , Wilson Sentanoe , Lars Schmidt-Thieme

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great success for a variety of tasks such as node classification, graph classification, and link prediction. However, the use of GNNs (and machine learning more generally) to solve combinatorial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Frederik Wenkel , Semih Cantürk , Stefan Horoi , Michael Perlmutter , Guy Wolf

We demonstrate that a single training trajectory can transform a graph neural network into an unsupervised heuristic for combinatorial optimization. Focusing on the Travelling Salesman Problem, we show that encoding global structural…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yimeng Min , Carla P. Gomes

We present a novel neural architecture to solve graph optimization problems where the solution consists of arbitrary node labels, allowing us to solve hard problems like graph coloring. We train our model using reinforcement learning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-11 Lukas Gianinazzi , Maximilian Fries , Nikoli Dryden , Tal Ben-Nun , Maciej Besta , Torsten Hoefler

Modeling generative process of growing graphs has wide applications in social networks and recommendation systems, where cold start problem leads to new nodes isolated from existing graph. Despite the emerging literature in learning graph…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Da Xu , Chuanwei Ruan , Kamiya Motwani , Evren Korpeoglu , Sushant Kumar , Kannan Achan

While Annealing Machines (AM) have shown increasing capabilities in solving complex combinatorial problems, positioning themselves as a more immediate alternative to the expected advances of future fully quantum solutions, there are still…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-13 Pablo Loyola , Kento Hasegawa , Andres Hoyos-Idobro , Kazuo Ono , Toyotaro Suzumura , Yu Hirate , Masanao Yamaoka

In the area of physical simulations, nearly all neural-network-based methods directly predict future states from the input states. However, many traditional simulation engines instead model the constraints of the system and select the state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-31 Yulia Rubanova , Alvaro Sanchez-Gonzalez , Tobias Pfaff , Peter Battaglia

Branch and bound methods which are based on the principle "divide and conquer" are a well established solution approach in single-objective integer programming. In multi-objective optimization branch and bound algorithms are increasingly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-08 Julius Bauß , Sophie N. Parragh , Michael Stiglmayr

This paper proposes a novel primal heuristic for Mixed Integer Programs, by employing machine learning techniques. Mixed Integer Programming is a general technique for formulating combinatorial optimization problems. Inside a solver, primal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-05 Yunzhuang Shen , Yuan Sun , Andrew Eberhard , Xiaodong Li

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success on multiple graph-based learning tasks by fusing network structure and node features. Modern GNN models are built upon iterative aggregation of neighbor's/proximity features by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Susheel Suresh , Vinith Budde , Jennifer Neville , Pan Li , Jianzhu Ma

In multiobjective optimization, most branch and bound algorithms provide the decision maker with the whole Pareto front, and then decision maker could select a single solution finally. However, if the number of objectives is large, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-29 Weitian Wu , Xinmin Yang