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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 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

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 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

Combinatorial Optimization (CO) has been a long-standing challenging research topic featured by its NP-hard nature. Traditionally such problems are approximately solved with heuristic algorithms which are usually fast but may sacrifice the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Runzhong Wang , Zhigang Hua , Gan Liu , Jiayi Zhang , Junchi Yan , Feng Qi , Shuang Yang , Jun Zhou , Xiaokang Yang

Since the 1990s, considerable empirical work has been carried out to train statistical models, such as neural networks (NNs), as learned heuristics for combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. When successful, such an approach eliminates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-21 Orit Davidovich , Shimrit Shtern , Segev Wasserkrug , Nimrod Megiddo

Recently, neural heuristics based on deep reinforcement learning have exhibited promise in solving multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems (MOCOPs). However, they are still struggling to achieve high learning efficiency and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Jinbiao Chen , Jiahai Wang , Zizhen Zhang , Zhiguang Cao , Te Ye , Siyuan Chen

Using machine learning to solve combinatorial optimization (CO) problems is challenging, especially when the data is unlabeled. This work proposes an unsupervised learning framework for CO problems. Our framework follows a standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Haoyu Wang , Nan Wu , Hang Yang , Cong Hao , Pan Li

Heuristic design with large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising approach for tackling combinatorial optimization problems (COPs). However, existing approaches often rely on manually predefined evolutionary computation (EC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Yiding Shi , Jianan Zhou , Wen Song , Jieyi Bi , Yaoxin Wu , Zhiguang Cao , Jie Zhang

Relevant combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) are often NP-hard. While they have been tackled mainly via handcrafted heuristics in the past, advances in neural networks have motivated the development of general methods to learn…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Tim Dernedde , Daniela Thyssens , Sören Dittrich , Maximilian Stubbemann , Lars Schmidt-Thieme

Combinatorial optimization problems are notoriously challenging for neural networks, especially in the absence of labeled instances. This work proposes an unsupervised learning framework for CO problems on graphs that can provide integral…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Nikolaos Karalias , Andreas Loukas

Combinatorial optimization is widely applied in a number of areas nowadays. Unfortunately, many combinatorial optimization problems are NP-hard which usually means that they are unsolvable in practice. However, it is often unnecessary to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2012-07-10 Daniel Karapetyan

Graph-structured data is ubiquitous throughout natural and social sciences, and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently been shown to be effective at solving prediction and inference problems on graph data. In this paper, we propose and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Victoria M. Dax , Jiachen Li , Kevin Leahy , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) aims at designing problem-independent and efficient neural network-based strategies for solving combinatorial problems. The field recently experienced growth by successfully adapting architectures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Michal Lisicki , Arash Afkanpour , Graham W. Taylor

Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a promising learning-based paradigm for addressing Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) by minimizing the need for extensive manual engineering. While existing NCO methods, trained on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Yuanyao Chen , Rongsheng Chen , Fu Luo , Zhenkun Wang

Many traditional algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems involve using hand-crafted heuristics that sequentially construct a solution. Such heuristics are designed by domain experts and may often be suboptimal due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Nina Mazyavkina , Sergey Sviridov , Sergei Ivanov , Evgeny Burnaev

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

A core issue with learning to optimize neural networks has been the lack of generalization to real world problems. To address this, we describe a system designed from a generalization-first perspective, learning to update optimizer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Diogo Almeida , Clemens Winter , Jie Tang , Wojciech Zaremba

Much as replacing hand-designed features with learned functions has revolutionized how we solve perceptual tasks, we believe learned algorithms will transform how we train models. In this work we focus on general-purpose learned optimizers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Luke Metz , Niru Maheswaranathan , C. Daniel Freeman , Ben Poole , Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

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
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