Prediction-Based Adaptive Variable Ordering Heuristics for Constraint Satisfaction Problems
Document Type
Conference Paper
Publication Date
2025
DOI
10.1609/aaai.v39i11.33239
Publication Title
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Volume
39
Issue
11
Pages
11390-11398
Conference Name
39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, February 25-March 4, 2025, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Abstract
Variable ordering heuristics (VOH) play a central role in solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP). The performance of different VOHs may vary greatly when solving the same CSP instance, so identifying an efficient candidate VOH for a given CSP has been a key issue in the community. In this study, we propose a prediction-based approach to adaptively select efficient VOHs for different CSPs from a set of candidates. Our work demonstrates that efficient candidate VOHs can be identified by learning from the topology of search trees. Specifically, we propose to represent the topology of a binary search tree by the sequence of the Numbers of Positive Decisions (NPD) made before each failure occurs. Based on the representation, we predict the total failure number of a search tree from its beginning part. When solving a CSP, we run a probing procedure to obtain the NPD sequences generated by candidate VOHs and select an efficient one for the resolution according to the prediction results. Our experiments show that the Long Short Term Memory model and Gradient Boosting Decision Tree models trained with the search trees sampled from easy instances are effective in identifying efficient VOHs for hard instances. The models capture some common structure properties hidden in the search trees of different problems. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art adaptive VOHs in terms of the number of solved instances and the PAR2 score of runtime.
Rights
© 2024, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.
Included in accordance with publisher policy.
Original Publication Citation
Xu, J., Wu, Y., Li, H., & Yin, M. (2025). Prediction-based adaptive variable ordering heuristics for constraint satisfaction problems. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 39(11), 11390-11398. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v39i11.33239
Repository Citation
Xu, J., Wu, Y., Li, H., & Yin, M. (2025). Prediction-based adaptive variable ordering heuristics for constraint satisfaction problems. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 39(11), 11390-11398. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v39i11.33239