Autonomous Learning Group University of Tübingen

Combinatorial Optimization

CombOptNet

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While this project is not directly using the blackbox differentiation framework, its spirit is closely linked to the idea of using combinatorial solvers in deep neural networks. This paper asks the question whether it is possible to design an architecture that is not tailored to one specific combinatorial problem as in the blackbox differentiation framework, but instead offers universal combinatorial expressivity.

We describe CombOptNet, which learns the underlying combinatorial problem that governs the training data, by learning the parameters of the full specification of a general Integer Linear Program. Specifically, we show that we can solve challenging tasks such as knapsack problems from natural language description, as well as visual combinatorial graph matching, without a priori specifying the underlying combinatorial problem.

Publications

CombOptNet: Fit the Right NP-Hard Problem by Learning Integer Programming Constraints
CombOptNet: Fit the Right NP-Hard Problem by Learning Integer Programming Constraints
Anselm Paulus, Michal Rolínek, Vít Musil, Brandon Amos, Georg Martius
Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning  ·  2021