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The hardness of combinatorial optimization (CO) problems hinders collecting solutions for supervised learning. However, learning neural networks for CO problems is notoriously difficult in lack of the labeled data as the training is easily…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Haoran Sun , Etash K. Guha , Hanjun Dai

Combinatorial Optimisation problems arise in several application domains and are often formulated in terms of graphs. Many of these problems are NP-hard, but exact solutions are not always needed. Several heuristics have been developed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-23 David Ireland , Giovanni Montana

Neural approaches for combinatorial optimization (CO) equip a learning mechanism to discover powerful heuristics for solving complex real-world problems. While neural approaches capable of high-quality solutions in a single shot are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-18 Jinho Choo , Yeong-Dae Kwon , Jihoon Kim , Jeongwoo Jae , André Hottung , Kevin Tierney , Youngjune Gwon

Optimization problems are ubiquitous in our societies and are present in almost every segment of the economy. Most of these optimization problems are NP-hard and computationally demanding, often requiring approximate solutions for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-23 James Kotary , Ferdinando Fioretto , Pascal Van Hentenryck

Combinatorial optimization (CO) is the fundamental problem at the intersection of computer science, applied mathematics, etc. The inherent hardness in CO problems brings up challenge for solving CO exactly, making deep-neural-network-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-02 Runzhong Wang , Yang Li , Junchi Yan , Xiaokang Yang

Many prediction problems, such as those that arise in the context of robotics, have a simplifying underlying structure that, if known, could accelerate learning. In this paper, we present a strategy for learning a set of neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-06 Ferran Alet , Tomás Lozano-Pérez , Leslie P. Kaelbling

Engineers learn from every design they create, building intuition that helps them quickly identify promising solutions for new problems. Topology optimization (TO) - a well-established computational method for designing structures with…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Igor Kuszczak , Gawel Kus , Federico Bosi , Miguel A. Bessa

Efficient characterization of quantum devices is a significant challenge critical for the development of large scale quantum computers. We consider an experimentally motivated situation, in which we have a decent estimate of the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-04-12 Przemyslaw Bienias , Alireza Seif , Mohammad Hafezi

Neural models have shown promise in solving NP-hard graph combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. Once trained, they offer fast inference and reasonably high-quality solutions for in-distribution testing instances, but they generally fall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Jialiang Li , Weitong Chen , Mingyu Guo

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

Current methods for end-to-end constructive neural combinatorial optimization usually train a policy using behavior cloning from expert solutions or policy gradient methods from reinforcement learning. While behavior cloning is…

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

In unsupervised combinatorial optimization (UCO), during training, one aims to have continuous decisions that are promising in a probabilistic sense for each training instance, which enables end-to-end training on initially discrete and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Fanchen Bu , Kijung Shin

Computing goal-directed behavior is essential to designing efficient AI systems. Due to the computational complexity of planning, current approaches rely primarily upon hand-coded symbolic action models and hand-coded heuristic-function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Rushang Karia , Siddharth Srivastava

Learned optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to hand-crafted optimizers, with the potential to discover stronger learned update rules that enable faster, hyperparameter-free training of neural networks. A critical element for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Abhinav Moudgil , Boris Knyazev , Guillaume Lajoie , Eugene Belilovsky

Recent advances in graph neural network architectures and increased computation power have revolutionized the field of combinatorial optimization (CO). Among the proposed models for CO problems, Neural Improvement (NI) models have been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Andoni I. Garmendia , Josu Ceberio , Alexander Mendiburu

Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) is a promising learning-based approach for solving challenging combinatorial optimization problems without specialized algorithm design by experts. However, most constructive NCO methods cannot solve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Fu Luo , Xi Lin , Fei Liu , Qingfu Zhang , Zhenkun Wang

A key challenge in deriving unified neural solvers for combinatorial optimization (CO) is efficient generalization of models between a given set of tasks to new tasks not used during the initial training process. To address it, we first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Semih Cantürk , Thomas Sabourin , Frederik Wenkel , Michael Perlmutter , Guy Wolf

Real-world problems are becoming highly complex and, therefore, have to be solved with combinatorial optimisation (CO) techniques. Motivated by the strong increase of publications on CO, 8,393 articles from this research field are subjected…

General Economics · Economics 2026-04-17 Jann Michael Weinand , Kenneth Sörensen , Pablo San Segundo , Max Kleinebrahm , Russell McKenna

Combinatorial optimization (CO) problems arise across a broad spectrum of domains, including medicine, logistics, and manufacturing. While exact solutions are often computationally infeasible, many practical applications require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Arman Mielke , Uwe Bauknecht , Thilo Strauss , Mathias Niepert

Standard meta-learning for representation learning aims to find a common representation to be shared across multiple tasks. The effectiveness of these methods is often limited when the nuances of the tasks' distribution cannot be captured…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Giulia Denevi , Massimiliano Pontil , Carlo Ciliberto