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Traditional solvers for tackling combinatorial optimization (CO) problems are usually designed by human experts. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in utilizing deep learning, especially deep reinforcement learning, to…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-04-13 Shengcai Liu , Yu Zhang , Ke Tang , Xin Yao

Neural Combinatorial Optimization attempts to learn good heuristics for solving a set of problems using Neural Network models and Reinforcement Learning. Recently, its good performance has encouraged many practitioners to develop neural…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Andoni I. Garmendia , Josu Ceberio , Alexander Mendiburu

Neural Combinatorial Optimization aims to learn to solve a class of combinatorial problems through data-driven methods and notably through employing neural networks by learning the underlying distribution of problem instances. While, so far…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Daniela Thyssens , Tim Dernedde , Wilson Sentanoe , Lars Schmidt-Thieme

A general framework of unsupervised learning for combinatorial optimization (CO) is to train a neural network (NN) whose output gives a problem solution by directly optimizing the CO objective. Albeit with some advantages over traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-24 Haoyu Wang , Pan Li

Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has mostly focused on learning policies, typically neural networks, that operate on a single candidate solution at a time, either by constructing one from scratch or iteratively improving it. In…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Andoni Irazusta Garmendia , Josu Ceberio , Alexander Mendiburu

Over the recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) starts to show promising results in tackling combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, in particular when coupled with curriculum learning to facilitate training. Despite emerging empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Runlong Zhou , Zelin He , Yuandong Tian , Yi Wu , Simon S. Du

Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) is an emerging domain where deep learning techniques are employed to address combinatorial optimization problems as a standalone solver. Despite their potential, existing NCO methods often suffer from…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Andoni I. Garmendia , Quentin Cappart , Josu Ceberio , Alexander Mendiburu

Constructive neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) has attracted growing research attention due to its ability to solve complex routing problems without relying on handcrafted rules. However, existing NCO methods face significant…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Changliang Zhou , Xi Lin , Zhenkun Wang , Qingfu Zhang

Solving NP-hard/complete combinatorial problems with neural networks is a challenging research area that aims to surpass classical approximate algorithms. The long-term objective is to outperform hand-designed heuristics for…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Dobrik Georgiev , Danilo Numeroso , Davide Bacciu , Pietro Liò

Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) has gained significant attention due to the potential of deep learning to efficiently solve combinatorial optimization problems. NCO has been widely applied to job shop scheduling problems (JSPs) with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Igor G. Smit , Yaoxin Wu , Pavel Troubil , Yingqian Zhang , Wim P. M. Nuijten

This paper presents a framework to tackle constrained combinatorial optimization problems using deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). To this end, we extend the Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) theory in order to deal with constraints in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Ruben Solozabal , Josu Ceberio , Martin Takáč

Self-improvement has emerged as a state-of-the-art paradigm in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO), where models iteratively refine their policies by generating and imitating high-quality solutions. Despite strong empirical performance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Laurin Luttmann , Lin Xie

Learning to optimize (L2O) has recently emerged as a promising approach to solving optimization problems by exploiting the strong prediction power of neural networks and offering lower runtime complexity than conventional solvers. While L2O…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Zhihui Shao , Jianyi Yang , Cong Shen , Shaolei Ren

Neural Combinatorial Optimization approaches have recently leveraged the expressiveness and flexibility of deep neural networks to learn efficient heuristics for hard Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems. However, most of the current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Sahil Manchanda , Sofia Michel , Darko Drakulic , Jean-Marc Andreoli

Recent research has proposed neural architectures for solving combinatorial problems in structured output spaces. In many such problems, there may exist multiple solutions for a given input, e.g. a partially filled Sudoku puzzle may have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Yatin Nandwani , Deepanshu Jindal , Mausam , Parag Singla

The end-to-end neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) method shows promising performance in solving complex combinatorial optimization problems without the need for expert design. However, existing methods struggle with large-scale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Fu Luo , Xi Lin , Zhenkun Wang , Xialiang Tong , Mingxuan Yuan , Qingfu Zhang

Efficiently training a multi-task neural solver for various combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) has been less studied so far. Naive application of conventional multi-task learning approaches often falls short in delivering a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Chenguang Wang , Zhang-Hua Fu , Pinyan Lu , Tianshu Yu

The constructive approach within Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) treats a combinatorial optimization problem as a finite Markov decision process, where solutions are built incrementally through a sequence of decisions guided by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Jonathan Pirnay , Dominik G. Grimm

Curriculum learning has been successfully used in reinforcement learning to accelerate the learning process, through knowledge transfer between tasks of increasing complexity. Critical tasks, in which suboptimal exploratory actions must be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-17 Francesco Foglino , Christiano Coletto Christakou , Ricardo Luna Gutierrez , Matteo Leonetti

Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a promising approach for NP-hard problems. However, prevailing RL-based methods suffer from low sample efficiency due to sparse rewards and underused solutions. We propose Best-anchored…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Zijun Liao , Jinbiao Chen , Debing Wang , Zizhen Zhang , Jiahai Wang
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