Log-Driven Semantic Tuning for Mixed Integer Programming Solvers

Abstract

Automated configuration of mixed-integer programming (MIP) solvers largely relies on black-box optimization. Each trial requires an expensive solver run and provides only a scalar outcome, so tuning can require many such evaluations. Human experts take a different approach. They inspect solver logs, identify performance bottlenecks, and adjust the parameters that address them. We propose Log-Driven Semantic Tuning (LDST), which uses a large language model (LLM) to automate this process. LDST extracts compact diagnostics from solver logs, uses the LLM to propose sparse edits to the current best configuration based on parameter meanings and observed solver behavior, and validates each proposal before execution. A regime-adaptive objective selects the tuning signal according to the information available from a time-limited run, while a log-based completion signal estimates completion time from branch-and-bound tree growth recorded in ordinary solver logs, so that solved and unsolved runs share one time scale. On 215 instances from five benchmark sets, LDST reduces geometric-mean loss by 43.9% on easy instances and 16.7% on intermediate instances relative to the best of SMAC3, RBFOpt, and random search. In both regimes, LDST achieves a lower loss with 10 proposals than any of these baselines achieves with 50. Configurations that LDST tunes on a single instance also transfer better than baseline configurations to unseen instances of the same family.