The Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization Competition (ML4CO): Results and Insights

4 Mar 2022 · Maxime Gasse, Quentin Cappart, Jonas Charfreitag, Laurent Charlin, Didier Chételat, Antonia Chmiela, Justin Dumouchelle, Ambros Gleixner, Aleksandr M. Kazachkov, Elias Khalil, Pawel Lichocki, Andrea Lodi, Miles Lubin, Chris J. Maddison, Christopher Morris, Dimitri J. Papageorgiou, Augustin Parjadis, Sebastian Pokutta, Antoine Prouvost, Lara Scavuzzo, Giulia Zarpellon, Linxin Yang, Sha Lai, Akang Wang, Xiaodong Luo, Xiang Zhou, Haohan Huang, Shengcheng Shao, Yuanming Zhu, Dong Zhang, Tao Quan, Zixuan Cao, Yang Xu, Zhewei Huang, Shuchang Zhou, Chen Binbin, He Minggui, Hao Hao, Zhang Zhiyu, An Zhiwu, Mao Kun ·

Combinatorial optimization is a well-established area in operations research and computer science. Until recently, its methods have focused on solving problem instances in isolation, ignoring that they often stem from related data distributions in practice. However, recent years have seen a surge of interest in using machine learning as a new approach for solving combinatorial problems, either directly as solvers or by enhancing exact solvers. Based on this context, the ML4CO aims at improving state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components. The competition featured three challenging tasks: finding the best feasible solution, producing the tightest optimality certificate, and giving an appropriate solver configuration. Three realistic datasets were considered: balanced item placement, workload apportionment, and maritime inventory routing. This last dataset was kept anonymous for the contestants.

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