CORE MACHINE LEARNING

Fit The Right NP-Hard Problem: End-to-end Learning of Integer Programming Constraints

December 12, 2020

Abstract

Bridging logical and algorithmic reasoning with modern machine learning techniques is a fundamental challenge with potentially transformative impact. On the algorithmic side, many NP-Hard problems can be expressed as integer programs, in which the constraints play the role of their combinatorial specification. In this work, we aim to fully integrate integer programming solvers into neural network architecture by providing gradient update rules for both the objective and the constraints. The resulting end-to-end trainable architectures have the power of jointly extracting features from raw data and of solving a suitable (learned) combinatorial problem with state-of-the-art integer programming solvers. We experimentally validate our approach in multiple ways: on random constraints, on solving Knapsack instances from their description in natural language, and on a popular computer vision benchmark regarding keypoint matching.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Brandon Amos

Anselm Paulus

Georg Martius

Michal Rolinek

Vit Musil

Publisher

NeurIPS Workshop on Learning Meets Combinatorial Optimization

Research Topics

Core Machine Learning

Related Publications

May 12, 2026

HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

RESEARCH

NeuralSet: A High-Performing Python Package for Neuro-AI

Corentin Bel, Linnea Evanson, Julien Gadonneix, Andrea Santos Revilla, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Julie Bonnaire, Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Défossez, Théo Desbordes, Pablo Diego-Simón, Shubh Khanna, Juliette Millet, Pierre Orhan, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Alexis Thual, Hubert Jacob Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean Remi King, Josephine Raugel, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Sophia Houhamdi, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit

May 12, 2026

November 18, 2025

RESEARCH

CORE MACHINE LEARNING

Souper-Model: How Simple Arithmetic Unlocks State-of-the-Art LLM Performance

Roberta Raileanu, * Equal authorship, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Amar Budhiraja *, Anton Protopopov, Bhavul Gauri, Despoina Magka, Gaurav Chaurasia, Michael Slater, Shalini Maiti *, Tatiana Shavrina, Yoram Bachrach

November 18, 2025

October 13, 2025

REINFORCEMENT LEARNING

RESEARCH

SPG: Sandwiched Policy Gradient for Masked Diffusion Language Models

Paria Rashidinejad, Cai Zhou, Tommi Jaakkola, DiJia Su, Bo Liu, Feiyu Chen, Chenyu Wang, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Sid Wang, Siyan Zhao, Song Jiang, Yuandong Tian

October 13, 2025

September 24, 2025

RESEARCH

NLP

CWM: An Open-Weights LLM for Research on Code Generation with World Models

Chris Cummins, Hugh Leather, Aram Markosyan, Matteo Pagliardini, Tal Remez, Volker Seeker, Marco Selvi, Lingming Zhang, Abhishek Charnalia, Alex Gu, Badr Youbi Idrissi, Christian Keller, Daniel Haziza, David Zhang, Dmitrii Pedchenko, Emily McMilin, Fabian Gloeckle, Felix Kreuk, Francisco Massa, François Fleuret, Gabriel Synnaeve, Gal Cohen, Gallil Maimon, Jacob Kahn, Jade Copet, Jannik Kossen, Jonas Gehring, Jordi Armengol-Estape, Juliette Decugis, Keyur Muzumdar, Kunhao Zheng, Luca Wehrstedt, Maximilian Beck, Michael Hassid, Michel Meyer, Naila Murray, Oren Sultan, Ori Yoran, Pedram Bashiri, Peter O'Hearn, Pierre Chambon, Pierre-Emmanuel Mazaré, Quentin Carbonneaux, Rahul Kindi, Sida Wang, Taco Cohen, Vegard Mella, Yossi Adi, Yuxiang Wei, Zacharias Fisches

September 24, 2025

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.