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Graphs have been widely used to represent complex data in many applications. Efficient and effective analysis of graphs is important for graph-based applications. However, most graph analysis tasks are combinatorial optimization (CO)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-23 Yun Peng , Byron Choi , Jianliang Xu

The 2021 NeurIPS Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization (ML4CO) competition was designed with the goal of improving state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components with machine learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Amin Banitalebi-Dehkordi , Yong Zhang

Combinatorial optimization algorithms for graph problems are usually designed afresh for each new problem with careful attention by an expert to the problem structure. In this work, we develop a new framework to solve any combinatorial…

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) have been shown effective to generate combinatorial objects with desired properties. We here propose a new GFlowNet training framework, with policy-dependent rewards, that bridges keeping flow balance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Puhua Niu , Shili Wu , Mingzhou Fan , Xiaoning Qian

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) have been introduced as a method to sample a diverse set of candidates with probabilities proportional to a given reward. However, GFlowNets can only be used with a predefined scalar reward, which can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yihang Chen , Lukas Mauch

In this paper we present an algorithmic framework for solving a class of combinatorial optimization problems on graphs with bounded pathwidth. The problems are NP-hard in general, but solvable in linear time on this type of graphs. The…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2012-12-18 Mugurel Ionut Andreica

Generative Flow Networks for continuous scenarios (CFlowNets) have shown promise in solving sequential decision-making tasks by learning stochastic policies using a flow and a retrieval network. Despite their demonstrated efficiency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Zahin Sufiyan , Shadan Golestan , Yoshihiro Mitsuka , Shotaro Miwa , Osmar Zaiane

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

GFlowNets are a promising alternative to MCMC sampling for discrete compositional random variables. Training GFlowNets requires repeated evaluations of the unnormalized target distribution or reward function. However, for large-scale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Tiago da Silva , Luiz Max Carvalho , Amauri Souza , Samuel Kaski , Diego Mesquita

Combinatorial optimization (CO) layers in machine learning (ML) pipelines are a powerful tool to tackle data-driven decision tasks, but they come with two main challenges. First, the solution of a CO problem often behaves as a piecewise…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-06 Guillaume Dalle , Léo Baty , Louis Bouvier , Axel Parmentier

This study introduces GCO-HPIF, a general machine-learning-based framework to predict and explain the computational hardness of combinatorial optimization problems that can be represented on graphs. The framework consists of two stages. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Bharat Sharman , Elkafi Hassini

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) treat sampling from distributions over compositional discrete spaces as a sequential decision-making problem, training a stochastic policy to construct objects step by step. Recent studies have revealed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Nikita Morozov , Daniil Tiapkin , Sergey Samsonov , Alexey Naumov , Dmitry Vetrov

With the development of federated learning (FL), mobile devices (MDs) are able to train their local models with private data and sends them to a central server for aggregation, thereby preventing sensitive raw data leakage. In this paper,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Shunfeng Chu , Jun Li , Jianxin Wang , Zhe Wang , Ming Ding , Yijin Zang , Yuwen Qian , Wen Chen

Finding effective prompts for language models (LMs) is critical yet notoriously difficult: the prompt space is combinatorially large, rewards are sparse due to expensive target-LM evaluation. Yet, existing RL-based prompt optimizers often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Junmo Cho , Suhan Kim , Sangjune An , Minsu Kim , Dong Bok Lee , Heejun Lee , Sung Ju Hwang , Hae Beom Lee

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) have emerged as an innovative learning paradigm designed to address the challenge of sampling from an unnormalized probability distribution, called the reward function. This framework learns a policy on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Anas Krichel , Nikolay Malkin , Salem Lahlou , Yoshua Bengio

Combinatorial optimization is a fundamental problem found in many fields. In many real life situations, the constraints and the objective function forming the optimization problem are naturally distributed amongst different sites in some…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-03-16 Yuan Hong , Jaideep Vaidya , Haibing Lu

We present the Generative Flow Ant Colony Sampler (GFACS), a novel meta-heuristic method that hierarchically combines amortized inference and parallel stochastic search. Our method first leverages Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Minsu Kim , Sanghyeok Choi , Hyeonah Kim , Jiwoo Son , Jinkyoo Park , Yoshua Bengio

Combinatorial optimization problems near algorithmic phase transitions represent a fundamental challenge for both classical algorithms and machine learning approaches. Among them, graph coloring stands as a prototypical constraint…

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

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) for Combinatorial Optimization (CO) is an emerging paradigm for solving combinatorial problems using neural networks. In this paper, we address a central challenge of SSL for CO: solving problems with discrete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Nikolaos Karalias , Akbar Rafiey , Yifei Xu , Zhishang Luo , Behrooz Tahmasebi , Connie Jiang , Stefanie Jegelka