The competition has started !

[gasse]

We are delighted to announce today the start of the Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization (ML4CO) NeurIPS 2021 competition !

To get started, you are invited to consult our GitHub repository. It contains plenty of information about how to get the benchmark datasets, where to write your code, how to make a submission, and a lot of technical details about the competition.

We intend to propose a baseline ML implementation for each of the tasks as well, which will be released as soon as possible.

The competition's website has been updated to reflect some minor adjustments that have been made while preparing the competition:

• In the dual task, only single-variable branching will be permitted. While we had originally planned to allow branching on sets of variables (multi-variable branching), we have found this feature to be not very mature yet, with some inconsistencies encountered during our tests. We therefore have decided to fall back to the more well-established single-variable branching scheme instead.
• In the dual task, the optimal solution value will not be provided to SCIP at the beginning of the solving process. While we had originally planned to do so in order to turn branching into a pure dual problem, we realized that computing an optimal solution for every training instance was unfortunately unrealistic. Still, we deactivate all primal search heuristics in order to turn branching mostly into a dual problem.
• For the third problem benchmark, the anonymous problem, we had to filter a substantial amount of problematic instances which were either infeasible, too easy or too hard, and ended up with only 118 training instances instead of the 270 originally planned.

Please feel free to ask questions or report problems via the discussions forum in the repository, or send an email to the organisers at ml4co.competition@gmail.com.

We hope you'll have fun and you'll enjoy participating in this challenge, and we're eager to receive your first submissions soon. Stay safe !

Best,
The organizing team