English

VN-Solver: Vision-based Neural Solver for Combinatorial Optimization over Graphs

Artificial Intelligence 2023-08-08 v1

Abstract

Data-driven approaches have been proven effective in solving combinatorial optimization problems over graphs such as the traveling salesman problems and the vehicle routing problem. The rationale behind such methods is that the input instances may follow distributions with salient patterns that can be leveraged to overcome the worst-case computational hardness. For optimization problems over graphs, the common practice of neural combinatorial solvers consumes the inputs in the form of adjacency matrices. In this paper, we explore a vision-based method that is conceptually novel: can neural models solve graph optimization problems by \textit{taking a look at the graph pattern}? Our results suggest that the performance of such vision-based methods is not only non-trivial but also comparable to the state-of-the-art matrix-based methods, which opens a new avenue for developing data-driven optimization solvers.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2308.03185,
  title  = {VN-Solver: Vision-based Neural Solver for Combinatorial Optimization over Graphs},
  author = {Mina Samizadeh and Guangmo Tong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.03185},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

CIKM 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:49:17.943Z