English

Transport, Don't Generate: Deterministic Geometric Flows for Combinatorial Optimization

Machine Learning 2026-02-12 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Recent advances in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) have been dominated by diffusion models that treat the Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) as a stochastic N×NN \times N heatmap generation task. In this paper, we propose CycFlow, a framework that replaces iterative edge denoising with deterministic point transport. CycFlow learns an instance-conditioned vector field that continuously transports input 2D coordinates to a canonical circular arrangement, where the optimal tour is recovered from this 2N2N dimensional representation via angular sorting. By leveraging data-dependent flow matching, we bypass the quadratic bottleneck of edge scoring in favor of linear coordinate dynamics. This paradigm shift accelerates solving speed by up to three orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art diffusion baselines, while maintaining competitive optimality gaps.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.10794,
  title  = {Transport, Don't Generate: Deterministic Geometric Flows for Combinatorial Optimization},
  author = {Benjy Friedmann and Nadav Dym},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.10794},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Preprint. 10 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:31:47.194Z