ILP-BO: Integer Linear Programming-Based Black-Box Optimization
This study addresses the inability of traditional black-box optimization to guarantee global optimality of candidate solutions by proposing an Integer Linear Programming (ILP)-based black-box optimization framework. The proposed method reformulates discrete-domain kernel surrogate models as ILP problems, innovatively introducing binary auxiliary variables to exactly represent nonlinear kernel functions for objective linearization. Furthermore, it incorporates a Hamming distance margin mechanism to balance exploration and exploitation. Experimental results on synthetic and discrete benchmark problems demonstrate that this approach achieves performance comparable to mainstream Bayesian optimization algorithms while delivering transparent discrete optimization with provable global optimality certificates.