论文标题
学习分支的回顾
Lookback for Learning to Branch
论文作者
论文摘要
表达性和计算廉价的两分图神经网络(GNN)已被证明是基于深度学习的混合成分线性程序(MILP)求解器的重要组成部分。最近的工作证明了这种GNN在分支结合(B&B)求解器中取代分支(可变选择)启发式的有效性。这些GNN经过训练,离线和集合,以模仿非常好但计算昂贵的分支启发式,强大的分支。鉴于B&B会导致子隔间树,我们问(a)在B&B树的邻近节点中,目标启发式的依赖性是否很强,并且(b)如果是这样,我们是否可以将它们纳入我们的培训程序中。具体来说,我们发现,有了强大的分支启发式,孩子节点的最佳选择通常是父母的第二好的选择。我们将其称为“回顾”现象。令人惊讶的是,Gasse等人的典型分支GNN。 (2019年)经常错过这个简单的“答案”。为了通过将回顾现象纳入GNN中更接近地模仿目标行为,我们提出了两种方法:(a)标准跨层损耗函数的目标平滑,以及(b)添加父级(PAT)artarget(PAT)查找正常术语。最后,我们提出了一个模型选择框架,以结合更艰难的目标,例如在最终模型中解决时间。通过对标准基准实例进行广泛的实验,我们表明我们的提案导致B&B树大小的减少22%,并且在解决方案中提高了15%。
The expressive and computationally inexpensive bipartite Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have been shown to be an important component of deep learning based Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) solvers. Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of such GNNs in replacing the branching (variable selection) heuristic in branch-and-bound (B&B) solvers. These GNNs are trained, offline and on a collection of MILPs, to imitate a very good but computationally expensive branching heuristic, strong branching. Given that B&B results in a tree of sub-MILPs, we ask (a) whether there are strong dependencies exhibited by the target heuristic among the neighboring nodes of the B&B tree, and (b) if so, whether we can incorporate them in our training procedure. Specifically, we find that with the strong branching heuristic, a child node's best choice was often the parent's second-best choice. We call this the "lookback" phenomenon. Surprisingly, the typical branching GNN of Gasse et al. (2019) often misses this simple "answer". To imitate the target behavior more closely by incorporating the lookback phenomenon in GNNs, we propose two methods: (a) target smoothing for the standard cross-entropy loss function, and (b) adding a Parent-as-Target (PAT) Lookback regularizer term. Finally, we propose a model selection framework to incorporate harder-to-formulate objectives such as solving time in the final models. Through extensive experimentation on standard benchmark instances, we show that our proposal results in up to 22% decrease in the size of the B&B tree and up to 15% improvement in the solving times.