2022/08/22 by Jan Tönshoff, Tönshoff, Jan, Berke Kisin +5 · 4 citations
Computer Science · #AI-based Problem Solving and Planning #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2208.10227
openalex publication_date 2022/08/22 · openalex created_date 2022/08/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We propose a universal Graph Neural Network architecture which can be trained as an end-2-end search heuristic for any Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). Our architecture can be trained unsupervised with policy gradient descent to generate problem specific heuristics for any CSP in a purely data driven manner. The approach is based on a novel graph representation for CSPs that is both generic and compact and enables us to process every possible CSP instance with one GNN, regardless of constraint arity, relations or domain size. Unlike previous RL-based methods, we operate on a global search action space and allow our GNN to modify any number of variables in every step of the stochastic search. This enables our method to properly leverage the inherent parallelism of GNNs. We perform a thorough empirical evaluation where we learn heuristics for well known and important CSPs from random data, including graph coloring, MaxCut, 3-SAT and MAX-k-SAT. Our approach outperforms prior approaches for neural combinatorial optimization by a substantial margin. It can compete with, and even improve upon, conventional search heuristics on test instances that are several orders of magnitude larger and structurally more complex than those seen during training.