Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2210.05385

Enhancing Branch-and-Bound for Multi-Objective 0-1 Programming

Nicolas Forget·Sophie N. Parragh
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

In the bi-objective branch-and-bound literature, a key ingredient is objective branching, i.e. to create smaller and disjoint sub-problems in the objective space, obtained from the partial dominance of the lower bound set by the upper bound set. When considering three or more objective functions, however, applying objective branching becomes more complex, and its benefit has so far been unclear. In this paper, we investigate several ingredients which allow to better exploit objective branching in a multi-objective setting. We extend the idea of probing to multiple objectives, enhance it in several ways, and show that when coupled with objective branching, it results in significant speed-ups in terms of CPU times. We also investigate cut generation based on the objective branching constraints. Besides, we generalize the best-bound idea for node selection to multiple objectives and we show that the proposed rules outperform the, in the multi-objective literature, commonly employed depth-first and breadth-first strategies. We also analyze problem specific branching rules. We test the proposed ideas on available benchmark instances for three problem classes with three and four objectives, namely the capacitated facility location problem, the uncapacitated facility location problem, and the knapsack problem. Our enhanced multi-objective branch-and-bound algorithm outperforms the best existing branch-and-bound based approach and is the first to obtain competitive and even slightly better results than a state-of-the-art objective space search method on a subset of the problem classes.

Explore related subjects

cs.DS

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Nicolas Forget, Sophie N. Parragh. 2022-10-17. Enhancing Branch-and-Bound for Multi-Objective 0-1 Programming. https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2022.0299

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Independent Set Reconfiguration via Dilworth Decompositions

The Token Jumping and Sliding Token problems are fundamental reconfiguration problems defined on the independent sets of an undirected graph. Given two independent sets $I$ and $J$, each of size $k$, these problems ask whether there exists a sequence of elementary operations transforming $I$ into $J$ such that every intermediate configuration is also an independent set of size $k$. Suppose a token is placed on each vertex of $I$: in Sliding Token, an operation moves a token from a vertex $u \in I$ to an adjacent vertex $v \notin I$; in Token Jumping, the token may instead move to any vertex $v \notin I$. While both problems are $\mathsf{PSPACE}$-complete on general graphs, polynomial-time algorithms for one or both variants have been developed for several graph classes, including trees, block graphs, bipartite permutation graphs, cographs, $P_4$-tidy graphs, and interval graphs. In this paper, we prove that both problems are solvable in polynomial time on threshold signed graphs, also known as Dilworth-2 graphs. A graph $G=(V,E)$ is a threshold signed graph if there exist a mapping $a:V\to\mathbb{R}$ and positive real constants $S,T>0$ such that $|a(v)|< \min\{S,T\}$ for all $v \in V$, and for any distinct vertices $u,v\in V$, $\{u,v\}\in E$ if and only if $|a(u)+a(v)|\ge S$ or $|a(u)-a(v)|\ge T$. More generally, we also show that Token Jumping can be solved in time $n^{O(\mathcal{D}(G))}$, where $\mathcal{D}(G)$ denotes the Dilworth number of $G$. Thus, Token Jumping belongs to $\mathsf{XP}$ when parameterised by the Dilworth number. This graph class is a subclass of permutation graphs, for which the complexity of these problems remains open, and is incomparable with the class of bipartite permutation graphs studied by Fox-Epstein et al. (ISAAC, 2015).

cs.DS↗
arXiv2026

Matrix Spencer: Eight Standard Deviations Suffice and an Almost-Linear Time Algorithm for Dense Input

The Matrix Spencer conjecture asserts that for all symmetric matrices $A_1,\ldots,A_n\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times n}$ with $\|A_i\|\le1$ there are signs $\varepsilon_1,\ldots,\varepsilon_n\in\{-1,1\}$ with $\|\sum_{i=1}^n\varepsilon_iA_i\|=O(\sqrt n)$. We prove it: a signing of discrepancy below $8\sqrt n$ always exists. We also give a randomized algorithm that finds a signing of discrepancy below $12\sqrt n$ with failure probability at most $p$. The algorithm uses $n^{3+o(1)}\operatorname{polylog}(1/p)$ arithmetic operations in the real-arithmetic model. This matches the size $n^3$ of the dense input up to subpolynomial factors. In the other direction, we prove that for every $n$ there are collections of symmetric matrices such that every signing has discrepancy at least $(2-o(1))\sqrt{n}$. We present three different proofs of the matrix Spencer conjecture. The key to every proof is a hereditary small-ball estimate. This is a lower bound on the Gaussian measure of the spectral body $\{x\in \mathbb{R}^n:\|\sum_ix_iA_i\|\le R\}$ that holds for every subfamily of the matrices. The other ingredient turns that Gaussian measure into a partial signing. We give three approaches to obtain such a signing. The first one covers the cube by partially signed faces through Gaussian concentration with a constant $7\cdot10^9$. The second proof replaces the covering by a projection lemma with explicit parameters for a constant $156000$. The third proof turns Gaussian measure into signs by a lossless coding, with no union bound. It proves the estimate at the right radius with smooth spectral barriers and certified coefficients. It gives a constant below $7.88$. For algorithms, the main idea is to project Gaussian points onto a smoothed spectral body. The $n^{3+o(1)}$ time algorithm tracks the Gibbs matrix of that body across coordinate-descent steps with sketched increments and random refreshes.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2026

On Deterministically Computing Total Variation Distance via Zonotope Compression

We study deterministic relative approximation of the total variation distance between high-dimensional distributions given by succinct descriptions. We develop an abstract deterministic approximation framework based on representing the total variation distance as a support function of a low-dimensional zonotope. As applications, we obtain FPTASs for several models. Given two mixtures of product distributions over $[q]^n$ with a total of $K$ component distributions, our algorithm approximates their TV-distance within a factor of $1+\varepsilon$ in time $\widetilde O_K(nq(n/\varepsilon)^{2K})$. We also give an FPTAS for mixtures of $n$-step Markov chains over $[q]^n$ with a total of $K$ component distributions, with running time $\widetilde O_K(nq^2(n/\varepsilon)^{2K})$. Finally, for two latent-tree Ising models with the same underlying tree topology, we give an FPTAS for the TV-distance between their leaf marginals in time $O(|V|^{13}\varepsilon^{-12})$.

cs.DS↗