Differentiable Initialization-Accelerated CPU-GPU Hybrid Combinatorial Scheduling

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Abstract:This paper presents a hybrid CPU-GPU framework for solving combinatorial scheduling problems formulated as Integer Linear Programming (ILP). While scheduling underpins many optimization tasks in computing systems, solving these problems optimally at scale remains a long-standing challenge due to their NP-hard nature. We introduce a novel approach that combines differentiable optimization with classical ILP solving. Specifically, we utilize differentiable presolving to rapidly generate high-quality partial solutions, which serve as warm-starts for commercial ILP solvers (CPLEX, Gurobi) and rising open-source solver HiGHS. This method enables significantly improved early pruning compared to state-of-the-art standalone solvers. Empirical results across industry-scale benchmarks demonstrate up to a $10\times$ performance gain over baselines, narrowing the optimality gap to $<0.1%$. This work represents the first demonstration of utilizing differentiable optimization to initialize exact ILP solvers for combinatorial scheduling, opening new opportunities to integrate machine learning infrastructure with classical exact optimization methods across broader domains.

Comments: 7 pages, 4 figures, 8 equations, 3 tables

Subjects:

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Hardware Architecture (cs.AR)

Cite as: arXiv:2603.28943 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2603.28943v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.28943

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Mingju Liu [view email] [v1] Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:35:31 UTC (192 KB)