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Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms find applications in inventory control, recommender systems, vehicular traffic management, cloud computing and robotics. The real-world complications of many tasks arising in these domains makes them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Sindhu Padakandla

Combinatorial optimization problems arise in a wide range of applications from diverse domains. Many of these problems are NP-hard and designing efficient heuristics for them requires considerable time and experimentation. On the other…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Juho Lauri , Sourav Dutta , Marco Grassia , Deepak Ajwani

Combinatorial optimisation problems framed as mixed integer linear programmes (MILPs) are ubiquitous across a range of real-world applications. The canonical branch-and-bound algorithm seeks to exactly solve MILPs by constructing a search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Christopher W. F. Parsonson , Alexandre Laterre , Thomas D. Barrett

Reinforcement learning (RL) involves sequential decision making in uncertain environments. The aim of the decision-making agent is to maximize the benefit of acting in its environment over an extended period of time. Finding an optimal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Istvan Szita , Balint Takacs , Andras Lorincz

We introduce an order-invariant reinforcement learning framework for black-box combinatorial optimization. Classical estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) often rely on learning explicit variable dependency graphs, which can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Olivier Goudet , Quentin Suire , Adrien Goëffon , Frédéric Saubion , Sylvain Lamprier

Curriculum learning in reinforcement learning is used to shape exploration by presenting the agent with increasingly complex tasks. The idea of curriculum learning has been largely applied in both animal training and pedagogy. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Francesco Foglino , Christiano Coletto Christakou , Matteo Leonetti

We introduce a combinatorial optimization-enriched machine learning pipeline and a novel learning paradigm to solve inventory routing problems with stochastic demand and dynamic inventory updates. After each inventory update, our approach…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-08 Toni Greif , Louis Bouvier , Christoph M. Flath , Axel Parmentier , Sonja U. K. Rohmer , Thibaut Vidal

Most combinatorial optimization problems can be formulated as mixed integer linear programming (MILP), in which branch-and-bound (B\&B) is a general and widely used method. Recently, learning to branch has become a hot research topic in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Qingyu Qu , Xijun Li , Yunfan Zhou , Jia Zeng , Mingxuan Yuan , Jie Wang , Jinhu Lv , Kexin Liu , Kun Mao

In traditional reinforcement learning (RL), the learner aims to solve a single objective optimization problem: find the policy that maximizes expected reward. However, in many real-world settings, it is important to optimize over multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Eric Eaton , Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

This paper surveys the recent attempts at leveraging machine learning to solve constrained optimization problems. It focuses on surveying the work on integrating combinatorial solvers and optimization methods with machine learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 James Kotary , Ferdinando Fioretto , Pascal Van Hentenryck , Bryan Wilder

Experience replay enables reinforcement learning agents to memorize and reuse past experiences, just as humans replay memories for the situation at hand. Contemporary off-policy algorithms either replay past experiences uniformly or utilize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-21 Daochen Zha , Kwei-Herng Lai , Kaixiong Zhou , Xia Hu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that has been successfully applied to a wide variety of problems. However, it can be unpredictable and produce suboptimal results in complicated learning environments.…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Brian Mintz , Feng Fu

Excavation of irregular rigid objects in clutter, such as fragmented rocks and wood blocks, is very challenging due to their complex interaction dynamics and highly variable geometries. In this paper, we adopt reinforcement learning (RL) to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-01-28 Qingkai Lu , Yifan Zhu , Liangjun Zhang

In Reinforcement Learning (abbreviated as RL), an agent interacts with the environment via a set of possible actions, and a reward is generated from some unknown distribution. The task here is to find an optimal set of actions such that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Aditi Anand , Suman Banerjee , Dildar Ali

This survey (re)introduces reinforcement learning methods to economists. The curse of dimensionality limits how far exact dynamic programming can be effectively applied, forcing us to rely on suitably "small" problems or our ability to…

General Economics · Economics 2026-03-25 Pranjal Rawat

In this work, we study adaptive data-guided traffic planning and control using Reinforcement Learning (RL). We shift from the plain use of classic methods towards state-of-the-art in deep RL community. We embed several recent techniques in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Siavash Alemzadeh , Ramin Moslemi , Ratnesh Sharma , Mehran Mesbahi

Grouping problems aim to partition a set of items into multiple mutually disjoint subsets according to some specific criterion and constraints. Grouping problems cover a large class of important combinatorial optimization problems that are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-04-04 Yangming Zhou , Jin-Kao Hao , Béatrice Duval

Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (ERL), which integrates Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for optimization, has demonstrated remarkable performance advancements. By fusing both approaches, ERL has emerged as…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Pengyi Li , Jianye Hao , Hongyao Tang , Xian Fu , Yan Zheng , Ke Tang

Execution algorithms are vital to modern trading, they enable market participants to execute large orders while minimising market impact and transaction costs. As these algorithms grow more sophisticated, optimising them becomes…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-10-28 Ollie Olby , Andreea Bacalum , Rory Baggott , Namid Stillman

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be a data efficient approach for learning control tasks but is difficult to utilize in domains with complex observations such as images. In this paper, we present a method for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Marvin Zhang , Sharad Vikram , Laura Smith , Pieter Abbeel , Matthew J. Johnson , Sergey Levine