SHSP: Structure-Aware Hierarchical Solution Prediction for Mixed-Integer Linear Programming

arXiv:2608.25282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is a fundamental optimization paradigm in combinatorial optimization and has been widely applied across real-world domains. Due to its NP-hard nature, obtaining optimal solutions for large-scale or highly constrained MILP instances remains computationally prohibitive. Learning-based solution prediction has therefore emerged as a promising approach to provide high-quality variable assignment for solver acceleration. However, existing methods typically adopt a one-shot prediction paradigm that predicts the marginal probabilities of all variables simultaneously. As a result, the conditional dependencies among variables are only implicitly captured through message passing, with the burden of modeling the combinatorial structure falling entirely on the representational capacity of graph neural networks. To address this limitation, we propose the Structure-Aware Hierarchical Solution Prediction (SHSP) framework that replaces the parallel marginal decoding of one-shot methods with a novel hierarchical conditional decoding mechanism. Specifically, SHSP constructs a variable coupling graph from the constraint structure, decodes variables sequentially along a hierarchy of increasing coupling strength, and conditions each hierarchy on previously predicted assignments. To mitigate error accumulation during the decoding process, SHSP further incorporates a confidence-aware mask-and-repair mechanism to identify and correct unreliable intermediate predictions. We integrate SHSP with multiple learning-guided search methods, and evaluate it on four standard MILP benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that SHSP significantly outperforms existing one-shot prediction baselines, achieving a 54% average reduction in solution gap.

Abstract:Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is a fundamental optimization paradigm in combinatorial optimization and has been widely applied across real-world domains. Due to its NP-hard nature, obtaining optimal solutions for large-scale or highly constrained MILP instances remains computationally prohibitive. Learning-based solution prediction has therefore emerged as a promising approach to provide high-quality variable assignment for solver acceleration. However, existing methods typically adopt a one-shot prediction paradigm that predicts the marginal probabilities of all variables simultaneously. As a result, the conditional dependencies among variables are only implicitly captured through message passing, with the burden of modeling the combinatorial structure falling entirely on the representational capacity of graph neural networks. To address this limitation, we propose the Structure-Aware Hierarchical Solution Prediction (SHSP) framework that replaces the parallel marginal decoding of one-shot methods with a novel hierarchical conditional decoding mechanism. Specifically, SHSP constructs a variable coupling graph from the constraint structure, decodes variables sequentially along a hierarchy of increasing coupling strength, and conditions each hierarchy on previously predicted assignments. To mitigate error accumulation during the decoding process, SHSP further incorporates a confidence-aware mask-and-repair mechanism to identify and correct unreliable intermediate predictions. We integrate SHSP with multiple learning-guided search methods, and evaluate it on four standard MILP benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that SHSP significantly outperforms existing one-shot prediction baselines, achieving a 54% average reduction in solution gap.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2608.25282 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2608.25282v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.25282 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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SHSP: Structure-Aware Hierarchical Solution Prediction for Mixed-Integer Linear Programming

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