Related papers: The Branch-and-Bound Tree Closure

A branch-and-bound (BB) tree certifies a dual bound on the value of an integer program. In this work, we introduce the tree compression problem (TCP): Given a BB tree T that certifies a dual bound, can we obtain a smaller tree with the same…

Strong Branching (SB) is a cornerstone of all modern branching rules used in the Branch-and-Bound (BnB) algorithm, which is at the center of Mixed-Integer Programming solvers. In its full form, SB evaluates all variables to branch on and…

Branch-and-bound algorithms (B&B) and polynomial-time approximation schemes (PTAS) are two seemingly distant areas of combinatorial optimization. We intend to (partially) bridge the gap between them while expanding the boundary of…

The classical branch-and-bound algorithm for the integer feasibility problem has exponential worst case complexity. We prove that it is surprisingly efficient on reformulated problems, in which the columns of the constraint matrix are…

We investigate the theoretical complexity of branch-and-bound (BB) and cutting plane (CP) algorithms for mixed-integer optimization. In particular, we study the relative efficiency of BB and CP, when both are based on the same family of…

The full strong branching (FSB) rule is well known to produce extremely small branch-and-bound trees. This rule guides branching decisions based exclusively on the information regarding local gains in the linear programming (LP) bounds. We…

Decision trees are one of the most useful and popular methods in the machine learning toolbox. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning optimal decision trees, a combinatorial optimization problem that is challenging to solve at…

Full binary trees naturally represent commutative non-associative products. There are many important examples of these products: finite-precision floating-point addition and NAND gates, among others. Balance in such a tree is highly…

Short spanning trees subject to additional constraints are important building blocks in various approximation algorithms. Especially in the context of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), new techniques for finding spanning trees with…

There has been a lot of recent work on Bayesian methods for reinforcement learning exhibiting near-optimal online performance. The main obstacle facing such methods is that in most problems of interest, the optimal solution involves…

Tree search algorithms, such as branch-and-bound, are the most widely used tools for solving combinatorial and nonconvex problems. For example, they are the foremost method for solving (mixed) integer programs and constraint satisfaction…

State-of-the-art branch and bound algorithms for mixed integer programming make use of special methods for making branching decisions. Strategies that have gained prominence include modern variants of so-called strong branching (Applegate,…

We present a new branch-and-bound type search method for mixed integer linear optimization problems based on the concept of offshoots (introduced in this paper). While similar to a classic branch-and-bound method, it allows for changing the…

We improve the scalability of Branch and Bound (BaB) algorithms for formally proving input-output properties of neural networks. First, we propose novel bounding algorithms based on Lagrangian Decomposition. Previous works have used…

Branch-and-bound (BnB) algorithms are widely used to solve combinatorial problems, and the performance crucially depends on its branching heuristic.In this work, we consider a typical problem of maximum common subgraph (MCS), and propose a…

We present a general method for obtaining strong bounds for discrete optimization problems that is based on a concept of branching duality. It can be applied when no useful integer programming model is available, and we illustrate this with…

In this work we study the interleaving distance between merge trees from a combinatorial point of view. We use a particular type of matching between trees to obtain a novel formulation of the distance. With such formulation, we tackle the…

Formal verification is a rigorous approach that can provably ensure the quality of neural networks, and to date, Branch and Bound (BaB) is the state-of-the-art that performs verification by splitting the problem as needed and applying…

Machine learning is increasingly used to guide branch-and-cut (B&C) for mixed-integer linear programming by learning score-based policies for selecting branching variables and cutting planes. Many approaches train on local signals from…

Logic-Based Benders Decomposition (LBBD) and its Branch-and-Cut variant, namely Branch-and-Check, enjoy an extensive applicability on a broad variety of problems, including scheduling. Although LBBD offers problem-specific cuts to impose…