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Weiyong Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Weiyong Yang.

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SHSP: Structure-Aware Hierarchical Solution Prediction for Mixed-Integer Linear Programming

Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is a fundamental optimization paradigm in combinatorial optimization and has been widely applied across real-world domains. Due to its NP-hard nature, obtaining optimal solutions for large-scale or highly constrained MILP instances remains computationally prohibitive. Learning-based solution prediction has therefore emerged as a promising approach to provide high-quality variable assignment for solver acceleration. However, existing methods typically adopt a one-shot prediction paradigm that predicts the marginal probabilities of all variables simultaneously. As a result, the conditional dependencies among variables are only implicitly captured through message passing, with the burden of modeling the combinatorial structure falling entirely on the representational capacity of graph neural networks. To address this limitation, we propose the Structure-Aware Hierarchical Solution Prediction (SHSP) framework that replaces the parallel marginal decoding of one-shot methods with a novel hierarchical conditional decoding mechanism. Specifically, SHSP constructs a variable coupling graph from the constraint structure, decodes variables sequentially along a hierarchy of increasing coupling strength, and conditions each hierarchy on previously predicted assignments. To mitigate error accumulation during the decoding process, SHSP further incorporates a confidence-aware mask-and-repair mechanism to identify and correct unreliable intermediate predictions. We integrate SHSP with multiple learning-guided search methods, and evaluate it on four standard MILP benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that SHSP significantly outperforms existing one-shot prediction baselines, achieving a 54% average reduction in solution gap.

cs.LG

Learning Early-to-Final Solution Consistency for MILP Acceleration

Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is a fundamental problem class in operations research and combinatorial optimization, with broad applications to industrial decision-making. Owing to their NP-hardness, however, modern solvers may struggle to find high-quality solutions for challenging MILP instances within practical time limits. Recent learning-based approaches seek to accelerate MILP solving by directly predicting high-quality solutions from static instance-level features, such as variable-constraint bipartite graphs. Yet accurate solution prediction from instance features alone is difficult, and these methods largely overlook the information revealed during the solver's search process. In this paper, we find that solutions produced at the early search stage of MILP solvers, which are computationally cheap to obtain, are often structurally close to the solutions found after full-budget search. Motivated by this observation, we propose a new solver-informed paradigm that shifts the learning target from variable assignment to early-to-final consistency: for each variable, we predict whether its early-stage assignment should persist in full-budget solutions. The predicted consistency naturally guides downstream search, for instance by fixing the assignments deemed consistent. At inference time, we further ensemble consistency predictions across multiple early-stage solutions to improve robustness. Experiments across four MILP benchmarks show our method improves prediction-guided search across diverse downstream pipelines. With Gurobi, our proposed method reduces the primal gap by 56.9% on average and closes it completely on combinatorial auction instances. Besides, we transferred the Gurobi-trained model zero-shot to SCIP without adaptation, achieving a 36.4% average gap reduction across benchmarks.

cs.AI

Pareto Optimization with Robust Evaluation for Noisy Subset Selection

Subset selection is a fundamental problem in combinatorial optimization, which has a wide range of applications such as influence maximization and sparse regression. The goal is to select a subset of limited size from a ground set in order to maximize a given objective function. However, the evaluation of the objective function in real-world scenarios is often noisy. Previous algorithms, including the greedy algorithm and multi-objective evolutionary algorithms POSS and PONSS, either struggle in noisy environments or consume excessive computational resources. In this paper, we focus on the noisy subset selection problem with a cardinality constraint, where the evaluation of a subset is noisy. We propose a novel approach based on Pareto Optimization with Robust Evaluation for noisy subset selection (PORE), which maximizes a robust evaluation function and minimizes the subset size simultaneously. PORE can efficiently identify well-structured solutions and handle computational resources, addressing the limitations observed in PONSS. Our experiments, conducted on real-world datasets for influence maximization and sparse regression, demonstrate that PORE significantly outperforms previous methods, including the classical greedy algorithm, POSS, and PONSS. Further validation through ablation studies confirms the effectiveness of our robust evaluation function.

cs.NE

Detecting Complex Multi-step Attacks with Explainable Graph Neural Network

Complex multi-step attacks have caused significant damage to numerous critical infrastructures. To detect such attacks, graph neural network based methods have shown promising results by modeling the system's events as a graph. However, existing methods still face several challenges when deployed in practice. First, there is a lack of sufficient real attack data especially considering the large volume of normal data. Second, the modeling of event graphs is challenging due to their dynamic and heterogeneous nature. Third, the lack of explanation in learning models undermines the trustworthiness of such methods in production environments. To address the above challenges, in this paper, we propose an attack detection method, Trace2Vec. The approach first designs an erosion function to augment rare attack samples, and integrates them into the event graphs. Next, it models the event graphs via a continuous-time dynamic heterogeneous graph neural network. Finally, it employs the Monte Carlo tree search algorithm to identify events with greater contributions to the attack, thus enhancing the explainability of the detection result. We have implemented a prototype for Trace2Vec, and the experimental evaluations demonstrate its superior detection and explanation performance compared to existing methods.

cs.CR