Autoregressive RL Approach for Mixed-Integer Linear Programs.

Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is a widely used method for modeling combinatorial optimization problems. Due to the NP-hard nature of many of these problems, efforts using machine-learning (ML) have been proposed to generate heuristics to speed up solvers, while maintaining optimality. While there is prior work on using graph neural networks (GNNs) to produce high-quality partial solutions, the methods used are non-auto-regressive which model the prediction of variables as conditionally independent due to concerns with solver runtimes. In this paper, we propose a novel auto-regressive reinforcement learning (RL) framework using GNNs which directly optimize for optimality and solver runtimes. Experimental results show our RL method outperforms the benchmark Predict-And-Search (PNS) method on harder real-world problems (55.7