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Getting started

Clone this repository

git clone git@github.com:ds4dm/ml4co-competition.git
cd ml4co-competition

Download the training instances here, and extract the archive at the root of this repo

tar -xzf instances.tar.gz

Decide on a team name, and copy-paste the example contribution

cp -r submissions/example submissions/YOUR_TEAM_NAME
cd submissions/YOUR_TEAM_NAME

Set-up your Python dependencies by editing the following files

conda.yaml
init.sh

Install the ml4co conda environment by running

source init.sh

Implement your agent

To compete in each of our three tasks, you just have to edit one separate file

agents/
  primal.py    -> your team's agent for solving the primal task
  dual.py      -> your team's agent for solving the dual task
  config.py    -> your team's agent for solving the config task

If you plan to compete in a single task only, say the dual task, you'll only have to edit the agents/dual.py file.

You can also include any supplementary file which is required for your code to operate, such as additional python files, or a file containing your machine learning model's parameters for example.

Note: when we will evaluate your agents, the submissions/YOUR_TEAM_NAME folder will be the working directory, so that a file submissions/YOUR_TEAM_NAME/xxx can be directly accessed via

with open("xxx") as f:
  do_something

Each of the agents/primal.py, agents/dual.py and agents/config.py files work in the same way. Inside you will find two things:

  • an ObservationFunction that defines which features you want to extract from the SCIP solver at each step of the decision process. See the Ecole documentation to learn how to create a new observation function from scratch using PySCIPOpt, or to build one by reusing existing observation functions already built in Ecole.
  • a Policy responsible for taking decisions given past observations.

Note: both the observation function and the policy have a seed(seed) method, which is to be used to make your code deterministic. Also, each observation function or policy receives a problem string which indicates the problem benchmark currently being process. This string can be used to devise problem-specific agents.

Evaluate your agent

You can evaluate the performance of your agent locally on the validation instances (valid folder) of each problem benchmark by running

cd submissions/YOUR_TEAM_NAME
conda activate ml4co

# Primal task
python ../../common/evaluate.py primal item_placement
python ../../common/evaluate.py primal load_balancing
python ../../common/evaluate.py primal anonymous

# Dual task
python ../../common/evaluate.py dual item_placement
python ../../common/evaluate.py dual load_balancing
python ../../common/evaluate.py dual anonymous

# Config task
python ../../common/evaluate.py config item_placement
python ../../common/evaluate.py config load_balancing
python ../../common/evaluate.py config anonymous

Note: you can append --timelimit T (or -t T) to the evaluation commands to override the default time limit for evaluating each instance. For example, setting the time limit to T=10 seconds can be usefull for debugging. You can also append --debug (or -d) to print additional information during the evaluation.

Example: evaluation of the primal agent of the example team on the item_placement validation instances, with a time limit of T=10 seconds

cd submissions/example/
conda activate ml4co
python ../../common/evaluate.py primal item_placement -t 10

Output

Evaluating the primal task agent.
Processing instances from /home/maxime/ml4co-competition/instances/1_item_placement/valid
Saving results to /home/maxime/ml4co-competition/submissions/example/results/primal/1_item_placement.csv

Instance item_placement_9969.mps.gz
  seed: 0
  initial primal bound: 588.2972653370006
  initial dual bound: 9.231614899000279
  objective offset: 0
  cumulated reward (to be maximized): -5884.904040351671

Instance item_placement_9963.mps.gz
  seed: 1
  initial primal bound: 585.4090918017991
  initial dual bound: 4.434889350800125
  objective offset: 0
  cumulated reward (to be maximized): -5856.2727113597275

...

The cumulated reward for the primal task is the primal bound integral as defined here. As can be seen, the example agent does not perform very well in this task, with a primal integral roughly equal to the initial primal bound times the time limit, 10.

The evaluation results are saved to a distinct csv file for each task and each problem bechmark:

submissions/YOUR_TEAM_NAME/
  results/
    primal/
      1_item_placement.csv
      2_load_balancing.csv
      3_anonymous.csv
    dual/
      1_item_placement.csv
      2_load_balancing.csv
      3_anonymous.csv
    config/
      1_item_placement.csv
      2_load_balancing.csv
      3_anonymous.csv

Submit your agent

The main idea of our evaluation pipeline is that each team's submission consists of a single folder, i.e., submissions/YOUR_TEAM_NAME, which respects the following structure:

submissions/YOUR_TEAM_NAME/
  conda.yaml     -> the conda dependencies file, which specifies the packages to be installed (conda and/or pip)
  init.sh        -> the initialization script that sets up the environment (with additional dependencies not available on conda/pip)
  agents/
    primal.py    -> the code of the team's agent for the primal task, if any
    dual.py      -> the code of the team's agent for the dual task, if any
    config.py    -> the code of the team's agent for the config task, if any
  xxx            -> any other necessary file (for example, the parameters of an ML model)

Please send your team's folder compressed into a single ZIP file to the email address ml4co.competition@gmail.com when you make a submission, along with the following information:

  • name of your team.
  • task(s) in which you are competing (primal, dual, config).
  • whether your code requires a GPU or not to run.
  • whether your team is composed only of students or not (student leaderboard). A graduated PhD is not considered a student.

Additional remarks

We will not run the training of your ML models. Please send us only your final, pre-trained model, ready for evaluation.

We provide an official support to participants via the Github discussions of this repository. Please direct any technical or general question regarding the competition there, and feel free to answer the questions of other participants as well. We will not provide a privileged support to any of the participants, except in situations where it concerns a detail about their submission which they do not want to share.

To help us set up your conda environment on our side, it can be useful to include the output of conda env export --no-builds in your submission.

To make sure that your submission will install and run on our side, please try to evaluate it on your side within the singularity image we provide (instructions here). If your submission will not execute properly within this container on your side, there is little chance it will on ours.