Learning Adaptation to Solve Constraint Satisfaction Problems

  • Yuehua Xu ,
  • David Stern ,
  • Horst Samulowitz

LION 2009, Learning and Intelligent OptimizatioN |

Constraint-based problems are hard combinatorial problems and are usually solved by heuristic search methods. In this paper, we consider applying a machine learning approach to improve the performance of these search-based solvers. We apply reinforcement learning in the context of Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP) to learn a value function, which results in a novel solving strategy. The motivation underlying this approach is to solve previously unsolvable instances.