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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

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

Combinatorial optimization problems like the Traveling Salesman Problem are critical in industry yet NP-hard. Neural Combinatorial Optimization has shown promise, but its reliance on online reinforcement learning (RL) hampers deployment and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Hironori Ohigashi , Shinichiro Hamada

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

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

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

Combinatorial optimization is the field devoted to the study and practice of algorithms that solve NP-hard problems. As Machine Learning (ML) and deep learning have popularized, several research groups have started to use ML to solve…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Antoine François , Quentin Cappart , Louis-Martin Rousseau

Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a powerful framework for solving combinatorial optimization problems by integrating deep learning-based models. This work focuses on improving existing inference techniques to enhance…

The traveling salesman problem is a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem with strong exact algorithms. However, as problems scale up, these exact algorithms fail to provide a solution in a reasonable time. To resolve this, current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Yong Liang Goh , Wee Sun Lee , Xavier Bresson , Thomas Laurent , Nicholas Lim

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

Most neural solvers for the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) are trained to output a single solution, even though practitioners rarely stop there: at test time, they routinely spend extra compute on sampling or post-hoc search. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Andoni Irazusta Garmendia

End-to-end training of neural network solvers for graph combinatorial optimization problems such as the Travelling Salesperson Problem (TSP) have seen a surge of interest recently, but remain intractable and inefficient beyond graphs with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Chaitanya K. Joshi , Quentin Cappart , Louis-Martin Rousseau , Thomas Laurent

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 (NCO) has achieved remarkable performance, yet its learned model representations and decision rationale remain a black box. This impedes both academic research and practical deployment, since researchers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Zhiqin Zhang , Yining Ma , Zhiguang Cao , Hoong Chuin Lau

This paper presents a framework to tackle combinatorial optimization problems using neural networks and reinforcement learning. We focus on the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and train a recurrent network that, given a set of city…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-01-16 Irwan Bello , Hieu Pham , Quoc V. Le , Mohammad Norouzi , Samy Bengio

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

The field of neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) trains neural policies to solve NP-hard problems such as the traveling salesperson problem (TSP). We ask whether, beyond producing good tours, a trained TSP solver learns internal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Reuben Narad , Léonard Boussioux , Michael Wagner

Combinatorial Optimization (CO) encompasses a wide range of problems that arise in many real-world scenarios. While significant progress has been made in developing learning-based methods for specialized CO problems, a unified model with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Zefang Zong , Xiaochen Wei , Guozhen Zhang , Chen Gao , Huandong Wang , Yong Li

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

Combinatorial optimization has found applications in numerous fields, from aerospace to transportation planning and economics. The goal is to find an optimal solution among a finite set of possibilities. The well-known challenge one faces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Quentin Cappart , Thierry Moisan , Louis-Martin Rousseau , Isabeau Prémont-Schwarz , Andre Cire