When GNNs meet symmetry in ILPs: an orbit-based feature augmentation approach

A common characteristic in integer linear programs (ILPs) is symmetry, allowing variables to be permuted without altering the underlying problem structure. Recently, GNNs have emerged as a promising approach for solving ILPs. However, a significant challenge arises when applying GNNs to ILPs with symmetry: classic GNN architectures struggle to differentiate between symmetric variables, which limits their predictive accuracy. In this work, we investigate the properties of permutation equivariance and invariance in GNNs, particularly in relation to the inherent symmetry of ILP formulations. We reveal that the interaction between these two factors contributes to the difficulty of distinguishing between symmetric variables. To address this challenge, we explore the potential of feature augmentation and propose several guiding principles for constructing augmented features. Building on these principles, we develop an orbit-based augmentation scheme that first groups symmetric variables and then samples augmented features for each group from a discrete uniform distribution. Empirical results demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly enhances both training efficiency and predictive performance.

An Efficient Unsupervised Framework for Convex Quadratic Programs via Deep Unrolling

Quadratic programs (QPs) arise in various domains such as machine learning, finance, and control. Recently, learning-enhanced primal-dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) methods have shown great potential in addressing large-scale linear programs; however, this approach has not been extended to QPs. In this work, we focus on unrolling "PDQP", a PDHG algorithm specialized for convex QPs. Specifically, we propose a neural network model called "PDQP-net" to learn optimal QP solutions. Theoretically, we demonstrate that a PDQP-net of polynomial size can align with the PDQP algorithm, returning optimal primal-dual solution pairs. We propose an unsupervised method that incorporates KKT conditions into the loss function. Unlike the standard learning-to-optimize framework that requires optimization solutions generated by solvers, our unsupervised method adjusts the network weights directly from the evaluation of the primal-dual gap. This method has two benefits over supervised learning: first, it helps generate better primal-dual gap since the primal-dual gap is in the objective function; second, it does not require solvers. We show that PDQP-net trained in this unsupervised manner can effectively approximate optimal QP solutions. Extensive numerical experiments confirm our findings, indicating that using PDQP-net predictions to warm-start PDQP can achieve up to 45% acceleration on QP instances. Moreover, it achieves 14% to 31% acceleration on out-of-distribution instances.

Invar-RAG: Invariant LLM-aligned Retrieval for Better Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has shown impressive capability in providing reliable answer predictions and addressing hallucination problems. A typical RAG implementation uses powerful retrieval models to extract external information and large language models (LLMs) to generate answers. In contrast, recent LLM-based retrieval has gained attention for its substantial improvements in information retrieval (IR) due to the LLMs' semantic understanding capability. However, directly applying LLM to RAG systems presents challenges. This may cause feature locality problems as massive parametric knowledge can hinder effective usage of global information across the corpus; for example, an LLM-based retriever often inputs document summaries instead of full documents. Moreover, various pre-trained tasks in LLMs introduce variance, further weakening performance as a retriever. To address these issues, we propose a novel two-stage fine-tuning architecture called Invar-RAG. In the retrieval stage, an LLM-based retriever is constructed by integrating LoRA-based representation learning to tackle feature locality issues. To enhance retrieval performance, we develop two patterns (invariant and variant patterns) and an invariance loss to reduce LLM variance. In the generation stage, a refined fine-tuning method is employed to improve LLM accuracy in generating answers based on retrieved information. Experimental results show that Invar-RAG significantly outperforms existing baselines across three open-domain question answering (ODQA) datasets. Code is available in the Supplementary Material for reproducibility.