The author says ML wasn't used for solving Sudoku. Vision was only used for transducing the image of a sudoku puzzle to a puzzle structure in memory.
Someone on /r/programming pointed me here: http://apollon.issp.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~watanabe/sample/sudoku/in...
But the app seems to already handle those Ok without doing anything special: https://www.dropbox.com/s/arfd03kr8ieczk5/recursive-solver-k...