Reheated Gradient-based Discrete Sampling for Combinatorial Optimization
Abstract
Recently, gradient-based discrete sampling has emerged as a highly efficient, general-purpose solver for various combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, achieving performance comparable to or surpassing the popular data-driven approaches. However, we identify a critical issue in these methods, which we term ''wandering in contours''. This behavior refers to sampling new different solutions that share very similar objective values for a long time, leading to computational inefficiency and suboptimal exploration of potential solutions. In this paper, we introduce a novel reheating mechanism inspired by the concept of critical temperature and specific heat in physics, aimed at overcoming this limitation. Empirically, our method demonstrates superiority over existing sampling-based and data-driven algorithms across a diverse array of CO problems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.04047,
title = {Reheated Gradient-based Discrete Sampling for Combinatorial Optimization},
author = {Muheng Li and Ruqi Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.04047},
year = {2025}
}