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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

Existing approaches to solving combinatorial optimization problems on graphs suffer from the need to engineer each problem algorithmically, with practical problems recurring in many instances. The practical side of theoretical computer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Natalia Vesselinova , Rebecca Steinert , Daniel F. Perez-Ramirez , Magnus Boman

The intractability of deterministic solutions in solving $\mathcal{NP}$-Hard Combinatorial Optimisation Problems (COP) is well reported in the literature. One mechanism for overcoming this difficulty has been the use of efficient COP…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-04-25 Maxine T. Khumalo , Hazel A. Chieza , Krupa Prag , Matthew Woolway

Recent advances in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) have been dominated by diffusion models that treat the Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) as a stochastic $N \times N$ heatmap generation task. In this paper, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Benjy Friedmann , Nadav Dym

We propose a new approach for solving combinatorial optimization problem by utilizing the mechanism of chases and escapes, which has a long history in mathematics. In addition to the well-used steepest descent and neighboring search, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-04-25 Toru Ohira

Combinatorial optimization problems play crucial roles in real-world applications, and many studies from a physics perspective have contributed to specialized hardware for high-speed computation. However, some combinatorial optimization…

Applied Physics · Physics 2025-01-07 Tatsuya Naoi , Tatsuya Kishimoto , Jun Ohkubo

Recent breakthroughs both in reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization have made significant advances towards real world robotic system deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied to many problems without needing any…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Guillaume Bellegarda , Katie Byl

For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-31 Joshua Achiam , David Held , Aviv Tamar , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement learning has recently shown promise in learning quality solutions in many combinatorial optimization problems. In particular, the attention-based encoder-decoder models show high effectiveness on various routing problems,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-06 Aigerim Bogyrbayeva , Taehyun Yoon , Hanbum Ko , Sungbin Lim , Hyokun Yun , Changhyun Kwon

A single-celled amoeba can solve the traveling salesman problem through its shape-changing dynamics. In this paper, we examine roles of several elements in a previously proposed computational model of the solution-search process of amoeba…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Yusuke Miyajima , Masahito Mochizuki

Combinatorial optimization problems can be solved by heuristic algorithms such as simulated annealing (SA) which aims to find the optimal solution within a large search space through thermal fluctuations. The algorithm generates new…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2023-10-30 Shoummo Ahsan Khandoker , Jawaril Munshad Abedin , Mohamed Hibat-Allah

Efficiently tackling combinatorial reasoning problems, particularly the notorious NP-hard tasks, remains a significant challenge for AI research. Recent efforts have sought to enhance planning by incorporating hierarchical high-level search…

Combinatorial optimization problems are crucial in industry. However, many COPs are NP-hard, causing the search space to grow exponentially with problem size and rendering large-scale instances computationally intractable. Conventional…

Emerging Technologies · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Eiji Kawase , Shuta Kikuchi , Hideaki Tamai , Shu Tanaka

Combinatorial optimization finds an optimal solution within a discrete set of variables and constraints. The field has seen tremendous progress both in research and industry. With the success of deep learning in the past decade, a recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Mehdi Seyfi , Amin Banitalebi-Dehkordi , Zirui Zhou , Yong Zhang

Model-free deep-reinforcement-based learning algorithms have been applied to a range of COPs~\cite{bello2016neural}~\cite{kool2018attention}~\cite{nazari2018reinforcement}. However, these approaches suffer from two key challenges when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Nasrin Sultana , Jeffrey Chan , Tabinda Sarwar , A. K. Qin

This article explores the integration of deep learning models into combinatorial optimization pipelines, specifically targeting NP-hard problems. Traditional exact algorithms for such problems often rely on heuristic criteria to guide the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Lorenzo Sciandra , Roberto Esposito , Andrea Cesare Grosso , Laura Sacerdote , Cristina Zucca

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

Current hardware limitations restrict the potential when solving quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems via the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) or quantum annealing (QA). Thus, we consider training…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2020-04-30 Thomas Gabor , Sebastian Feld , Hila Safi , Thomy Phan , Claudia Linnhoff-Popien

Reinforcement learning-based methods for constructing solutions to combinatorial optimization problems are rapidly approaching the performance of human-designed algorithms. To further narrow the gap, learning-based approaches must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 André Hottung , Mridul Mahajan , Kevin Tierney

In the last decade, a plethora of algorithms for single-objective Boolean optimization has been proposed that rely on the iterative usage of a highly effective Propositional Satisfiability (SAT) solver. But the use of SAT solvers in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-26 João Cortes , Inês Lynce , Vasco Manquinho