TY - CHAP A1 - Chmiela, Antonia A1 - Khalil, Elias B. A1 - Gleixner, Ambros A1 - Lodi, Andrea A1 - Pokutta, Sebastian T1 - Learning to Schedule Heuristics in Branch and Bound T2 - Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021 N2 - Primal heuristics play a crucial role in exact solvers for Mixed Integer Programming (MIP). While solvers are guaranteed to find optimal solutions given sufficient time, real-world applications typically require finding good solutions early on in the search to enable fast decision-making. While much of MIP research focuses on designing effective heuristics, the question of how to manage multiple MIP heuristics in a solver has not received equal attention. Generally, solvers follow hard-coded rules derived from empirical testing on broad sets of instances. Since the performance of heuristics is instance-dependent, using these general rules for a particular problem might not yield the best performance. In this work, we propose the first data-driven framework for scheduling heuristics in an exact MIP solver. By learning from data describing the performance of primal heuristics, we obtain a problem-specific schedule of heuristics that collectively find many solutions at minimal cost. We provide a formal description of the problem and propose an efficient algorithm for computing such a schedule. Compared to the default settings of a state-of-the-art academic MIP solver, we are able to reduce the average primal integral by up to 49% on a class of challenging instances. Y1 - 2021 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Gasse, Maxime A1 - Bowly, Simon A1 - Cappart, Quentin A1 - Charfreitag, Jonas A1 - Charlin, Laurent A1 - Chételat, Didier A1 - Chmiela, Antonia A1 - Dumouchelle, Justin A1 - Gleixner, Ambros A1 - Kazachkov, Aleksandr M. A1 - Khalil, Elias A1 - Lichocki, Pawel A1 - Lodi, Andrea A1 - Lubin, Miles A1 - Maddison, Chris J. A1 - Christopher, Morris A1 - Papageorgiou, Dimitri J. A1 - Parjadis, Augustin A1 - Pokutta, Sebastian A1 - Prouvost, Antoine A1 - Scavuzzo, Lara A1 - Zarpellon, Giulia A1 - Yang, Linxin A1 - Lai, Sha A1 - Wang, Akang A1 - Luo, Xiaodong A1 - Zhou, Xiang A1 - Huang, Haohan A1 - Shao, Shengcheng A1 - Zhu, Yuanming A1 - Zhang, Dong A1 - Quan, Tao A1 - Cao, Zixuan A1 - Xu, Yang A1 - Huang, Zhewei A1 - Zhou, Shuchang A1 - Binbin, Chen A1 - Minggui, He A1 - Hao, Hao A1 - Zhiyu, Zhang A1 - Zhiwu, An A1 - Kun, Mao T1 - The Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization Competition (ML4CO): results and insights T2 - Proceedings of Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Y1 - 2022 ER -